Attached to Dispossession: Sacrificial Narratives in Post-Imperial Europe : Sacrificial Narratives in Post-Imperial Europe [1 ed.] 9789004358959, 9789004340671

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Attached to Dispossession

Balkan Studies Library Editor-in-Chief Zoran Milutinović (University College London)

Editorial Board Gordon N. Bardos (Columbia University) Alex Drace-Francis (University of Amsterdam) Jasna Dragović-Soso (Goldsmiths, University of London) Christian Voss (Humboldt University, Berlin) Advisory Board Marie-Janine Calic (University of Munich) Lenard J. Cohen (Simon Fraser University) Radmila Gorup (Columbia University) Robert M. Hayden (University of Pittsburgh) Robert Hodel (Hamburg University) Anna Krasteva (New Bulgarian University) Galin Tihanov (Queen Mary, University of London) Maria Todorova (University of Illinois) Andrew Wachtel (Northwestern University)

VOLUME 21

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/bsl

Attached to Dispossession Sacrificial Narratives in Post-imperial Europe By

Vladimir Biti

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Cover illustration: Srđan Ivanković, with the artist’s permission. The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at http://catalog.loc.gov LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2017050567

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 1877-6272 isbn 978-90-04-34067-1 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-35895-9 (e-book) Copyright 2018 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents Acknowledgments vii Introduction The Un/worlding of Letters: The Dis/junctures of Post-imperial Literatures 1 1 Ruling (Out) the Province and Its Consequences: Sovereignty, Dispossession, and Sacrificial Violence in the Early Work of Miloš Crnjanski and Miroslav Krleža 33 2 Disciplining the Wild(wo)men: Borisav Stanković’s Not Wannabe Bride and Janko Polić Kamov’s Wannabe Artist 60 3 A Rebellion on the Knees: Miroslav Krleža and the Croatian Narrative of Dispossession 97 4 The Carnival’s Victims: Miloš Crnjanski’s The Mask and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Arabella 122 5 Exempt from Belonging: Ivo Andrić, Karl Kraus, and Post-imperial Trauma 157 6 The Dis/location of Solitude: The Dispossession of the Paternal Protection in Joseph Roth’s The Radetzky March and Radomir Konstantinović’s Descartes’ Death 194 7 The Politics of Remembrance: Walter Benjamin’s Berlin Childhood Around 1900 and Miroslav Krleža’s A Childhood in Agram in 1902–1903 235 Works Cited 277 Index 297

Acknowledgments While working on this book I have presented or published portions of it in different forms. An abridged version of its introduction was presented as the keynote speech at the 4th International Symposium on Ethnic Literature at the Central China Normal University in Wuhan on June 3, 2017, and will be published in Foreign Literature Studies 4/2017. An extended version will appear in Forum for World Literature Studies 6/2017. An earlier version of Chapter 1 was published under the title “Ruling (Out) the Province and Its Consequences: Sovereignty, Dispossession, and Sacrificial Violence” in Vladimir Biti, ed., Claiming the Dispossession: The Politics of Hi/storytelling in Post-imperial Europe, Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2017, 19–49. Another version, titled as “The Concept of Post-imperial Literature”, was presented as an invited lecture at the School of Foreign Languages, Central China Normal University in Wuhan on June 12, 2017. Chapter 2 is an original contribution. The German-language version of Chapter 3, under the title “Miroslav Krleža und die kroatische Enteignungsgeschichte”, was presented as an invited lecture at the Institute of Slavic Studies, University of Tübingen, on December 9, 2015, and thereupon published in Wiener Slawistischer Almanach 78/2016, 31–61. A Croatian-language version will appear in Umjetnost riječi /The Art of Words: Journal for Literature, Theatre and Film Studies 1–2: 61 (2017). Chapter 4 is an original contribution. An earlier, Croatian-language version of Chapter 5, titled “Otimanje pripadnosti: Ivo Andrić i postimperijalna trauma”, was presented as an invited lecture at the Cultural Center GRAD in Belgrade on November 5, 2015. In August 2016, it was published by the event’s organizer, Radnička komuna Links, on its website http://www.komunalinks.com/home/2016/6/8/otimanje-pripadnosti#_ftn2. Portions of the same chapter, combined with those of Chapter 6 and titled “Past Empire(s), Post-Empire(s), and the Narratives of Disaster: Joseph Roth’s The Radetzky March and Ivo Andrić’s The Bridge over the Drina”, were presented as a distinguished plenary lecture at the XXI International Comparative Literature Association’s World Congress in Vienna on July 23, 2016. Another selection of portions, titled “The Many Faces of Sacrificial Narratives”, was presented as invited lectures at the School of Foreign Languages, Central China Normal University in Wuhan on June 13, 2017 and the Beijing Foreign Studies University on June 16, 2017.

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Parts of Chapter 6 were presented under the title “Narrating post-imperial Europe: two irreconcilable politics” at the workshop “Does narratology travel well?” at the XXI International Comparative Literature Association’s World Congress in Vienna on July 25, 2017. Another version, titled “Im Zeichen der Apokalypse East und West: Die enteignete Vaterschaft in Joseph Roths Radetzkymarsch und Radomir Konstantinovićs Der Tod des Descartes”, was presented, partly in German, as an invited lecture at the Institute of Slavic Studies, University of Hamburg on December 13, 2016. An earlier version of this chapter’s part devoted to Radomir Konstantinović, and written in Croatian language, was published in Sarajevske sveske 41–42/2013, 68–79. This part’s other, German-language version was presented at the workshop Raconter la théorie dans le roman at the XXth International Comparative Literature Association’s World Congress in Paris on July 20, 2013. The part of the chapter devoted to Joseph Roth was published under the title “The Dis/location of Solitude: Joseph Roth’s The Radetzky March” in Borislav Knežević et al., eds., The Errant Labor of Humanities: Festschrift Presented to Stipe Grgas on the Occasion of His 65th Birthday, Zagreb: FF Press, 2017. Portions of Chapter 7, titled as “Die Spätimperien im beschlagenen Spiegel: Walter Benjamins Berliner Kindheit und Miroslav Krležas Eine Kindheit in Agram”, were presented as an invited lecture in German at the Institute of Slavic Studies, University of Zurich on March 14, 2017. Another selection of portions from this chapter, under the title “Memory vs. History”, was presented as invited lectures at the School of Foreign Languages, Ningbo University on June 10, 2017 and the Beijing Foreign Studies University on June 15, 2017. I extend my gratitude to these hosts and publishers for their permission to use revised versions of these essays here. Vladimir Biti, July 2017

Introduction

The Un/worlding of Letters: The Dis/junctures of Post-imperial Literatures The feeling that the pattern of national literary and cultural historiography no longer works is growing in literary and cultural studies today. The evidence that Western literatures and cultures have been active constituents of globalization processes from early modernity onwards burgeons on a daily basis. However, the question remains open as to the manner in which this state of affairs has to be dealt with. The answer depends on the angle from which globalization is approached. There is an obvious disjuncture between the celebratory perspective of its carriers and the traumatized perspective of its victims, rendering globalization an equivocal development. Parallel to eliminating one set of inequalities, it deepens another. In spite of its carriers’ generous proclamations, imparity seems to be its essential element. Being at continuous pains to bridge up the existing gaps, it empowers some and dispossesses others. In Tracing Global Democracy I argued that the contribution of the modern idea of literature to the Western globalization of time, space, and meaning took place within this discriminatory frame. In this book I focused on discussions about what ‘proper’ literature ought to look like. Here I will argue that literary works as well, primarily those that lay claim to ‘properness’, emerge in response to particular traumatic constellations, i.e. “political arena(s) characterized by asymmetries along (their) many intersecting and overlapping axes” (Biti, Tracing 5), such as national, social, economic, cultural and gender ones. Rather than performing sovereign actions, literary authors respond to an injury experienced at these axes’ intersection. Their works emerge from “poisonous knowledge” acquired in shattered social relationships (Das 54). “History is what hurts”, famously remarked Fredric Jameson (102), and I would only add to this: especially some of its participants. With the rise of Western modernity, they find themselves relegated to “zones of indistinction”, the nonjuridical states of exception, which the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben interprets as the excluded enabling domains of legislated political orders (Homo Sacer 63, 112, 181). Although this relegation deprives them of their former identity attributes and political rights by reducing their human lives to bare life (nuda vita), Agamben leaves no doubt that it is their now inarticulate lives that provide the very condition of possibility of the acknowledged citizens’ articulate lives. He claims that, within the constellation of Western modernity, “bare life has the peculiar privilege of being that whose exclusion founds the common being of men” (10; trans. modified, la città degli uomini). According to him, the political life’s rule and bare life’s exception make the

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Introduction

conjoined disjunctive realms of Western modernity, which not only condition but subvert and dislocate each other. Agamben is not the only contemporary political philosopher who pairs modern political rule with exception. The French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari had already noticed that it is necessarily engulfed in the whirl of exception, which it cannot but “disgorge […] everywhere” (What Is Philosophy? 46–47). In place of a continuous history, this produces a discontinuity of “between-times (entre-temps), between-moments (entre-moments)” untranslatable into one another (Deleuze, “Immanence” 5; Pure Immanence 29). Following them, in his Homo Sacer, Agamben transforms modern history into an unpredictable succession of the thresholds of indiscernibility (soglia d’ indifferenza) or zones of indistinction (zona d’indistinzione) (Homo Sacer 4, 9, 18, 27–28), in which an ongoing deterritorialization of given political territories, disengagement of their engagements, and reconfiguration of their configurations take place. In the somewhat later State of Exception, he claims that such states of exception entered the public political sphere with the French Revolution and, in response to them, the sphere of private self-exemption with Kant’s aesthetic (37–39). Since then the clandestine non-juridical self-exemption counteracted the public juridical state of exception, enfranchising many more collectives and individuals in the continual refashioning of their identities. Inspired by this ‘revolutionary atmosphere’, Kant put every human under pressure to pull him- or herself out of the communal constraints that were established by determining judgments in order to accomplish individuality by way of a postponed reflective judgment. Individuality is by definition a state of exemption that cannot be shared with others or translated into regular states. Whereas determining judgments spontaneously apply a common rule as shared with the familiar others, this explains why reflective judgment, guided by the distant others, consistently exempts itself from this rule’s application (Critique of Judgment 15–16; 134–139). Since reflective judgment’s law exists exclusively in its inapplicability, it is doomed to an eternal itinerancy. It requires an unremitting evacuation of prejudgments, which is a demanding and interminable task. I interpret this inextricable intertwinement of the public juridical state of exception and the clandestine non-juridical self-exemption that was introduced into Western history by the French Revolution as a traumatic constellation which nurtures modern literary works. Banned by this historical development into the “zones of indistinction”, their authors are violently separated from their familiar community and forced to search for a new, remote one on the world’s looming horizon. However, such an opening toward the unknown and inarticulate others would be unimaginable without the previous establishment

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of commercial and communicational networks, as well as the invention of new technologies from the Renaissance onwards. Communicational, mercantile, monetary, and spiritual mobility foster and accelerate each other. To pick up just three well-known illustrations, Paul Gilroy emphasized the role of slave shipping in the establishment of Western modernity (The Black Atlantic), Benedict Anderson pointed out that print-capitalism enabled growing numbers of people to relate themselves to others in profoundly new ways (36), and Arjun Appadurai clarified to what extent the rise of mass media increased the influence of imagination in the shaping of global processes. “Even the meanest and most hopeless of lives, the most brutal and dehumanizing of circumstances, the harshest of lived inequalities are now open to the play of the imagination” (Appadurai 54). This is how those who find themselves drawn into the “zones of indistinction” experience the need and get the opportunity to exempt themselves into a spatial, temporal, cultural and/or political ‘elsewhere’. By compulsively meeting this need and using this opportunity, literary works enter the process of worlding. This answers Thomas Beebee’s fundamental question from his discussion of Nietzsche’s skeptical stance to world literature: “[W]hom is world literature consoling, and in what way?” (Beebee 376) Literature opens itself to distant otherness in order to heal the traumatic experience of indistinction characteristic of its authors’ dispossessed present. However, contrary to the dominant renderings of this turning toward the distant others, literary authors do not identify with these inarticulate others without previously articulating them. There is no identification with the distant others without an identification of these others as familiar beings; a sort of self-assertion inheres to any self-exemption.1 Since the distant and inarticulate others are by definition a threatening spectral appearance, they first have to be domesticated. It is only after they lose their unheimlich, i.e. an uncanny or unhomely character, that the traumatized authors make themselves into the medium of these others’ revelation or performance. This preliminary and surreptitious taming of the distant others results in an operation of “inverse ventriloquism” (Anderson 198). In contrast to the literary authors’ sacrificial self-presentation—since they claim to be victimizing themselves for the others—the distant others do not speak through their selves but their selves speak through the distant others. That which involuntarily ‘speaks’ through them is, more accurately, these authors’ traumatic constellations, which they 1  For the inextricable intertwinement of these two kinds of identification, see Borch-Jacobsen 164–172 and Fuss 11–16. For “idiopathic identification” that interiorizes the other within the self and “heteropathic identification” that goes out of one’s self to align oneself with another, see Silverman 185.

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Introduction

hide in front of both the others and themselves. This means, as Eric Santner put it, that their covert sacrificial narratives are “unconsciously designed to expunge the traces of the trauma or loss that called that narrative into being in the first place” (Santner 144) or, as Paul de Man put it, that their passionate attachment to the distant others “veils a defacement […] of which it is itself the cause” (De Man, “Autobiography” 81). As I will try to show in the following, instead of unveiling this veiling that inheres to their analytical objects, the interpreters of the works of ‘world literature’ compulsively reenact it. That is to say, they identify with their literary authors in the same domesticating way that these authors identify with the distant others. Instead of analytically disaggregating their authors’ experience of unhomeliness, to consecrate their own experience of unhomeliness they turn these authors into its passive victims. Endorsing in such a way their subjects’ “naturalist fallacy” (Alexander 13) instead of dismantling it, they continue naturalizing an experience that is all but natural. Giorgio Agamben’s above sketched argument is a case in point. It came in the immediate shadow of 9/11, which triggered the West’s ill-reputed ‘war on terror’ that he articulates his thesis of modern Western history as a discontinuous succession of states of exceptions. Even if the West was armed to the teeth, its fortified wholeness was subject to anxiety about the prospect of its durability, which drove it to repeat the gesture of the French Revolutionaries toward ‘strangers’ and to deprive of legal protection the ‘subhuman creatures’ as its alleged enemies.2 Agamben accordingly claims that it is only today’s world that “fully develops” the rule of the states of exception, which characterizes Western modernity (State of Exception 13). However, he stresses that already the First World War contributed substantially to its extension (7). My point is that Agamben charts this genealogy of the present, apparently universal state of exception—or the historical narrative of its rise via the Holocaust—in order to present his rendering of bare life as its culmination point. Amidst the whimsical discontinuity of political states of exception he thus establishes a transhistorical moral community of their victims and acts as their spokesperson. In fact, his rendering of bare life as the ferment of revolutionary change continues, in the delineated atmosphere, to naturalize Walter Benjamin’s consecration of bloßes Leben from the famous essay “Critique of Violence” (“Zur Kritik der Gewalt” 202–203), which itself emerged in the sinister atmosphere after the collapse of the Second German Empire. Benjamin’s essay is not only 2  For the thesis that the French Revolution’s definition of the citizen, while it abolishes many internal barriers, establishes an external barrier against foreigners, see Arendt, Origins 299– 300, Febvre 213–214, Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood 46–47.

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haunted by war trauma but also the crisis of parliamentary democracy in the defeated Germany, as well as the phantom of the ‘final solution’ that had begun to rise on the horizon. After all, when Agamben stated that “World War One (and the years following it) appear as a laboratory for testing and honing the functional mechanisms and apparatuses of the state of exception” (State of Exception 7), he might have had in mind the East-Central European post-imperial space in which, after the First World War, consecutive strikes, upheavals and revolutions induced a permanent state of exception (Berend 201). In this turbulent region, the traumatic “zone of indistinction” was unleashed from its former relegation to the imperial borderlands, invading the public political space rather than just the scattered dispossessed groups and individuals as had been the case in the aftermath of the French Revolution (Fritzsche 12–54). When Benjamin postulated in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1940) that the “ ‘state of exception’ in which we live is the rule” (“Über den Begriff” 254), I claim that he compulsively acted out—rather than worked through—the specific traumatic experience of post-imperial Europe’s victimized groups and individuals. This constellation visibly affects his argumentation, the more so the more he hides its particularity. The breakdown of the imperial patterns of collective action paved the way for their ideological reordering by charismatic leaders who requested their followers to forgo their short-term individual interests in favor of allegedly common long-term benefits (Hanson xv). By knitting together various groups’ frustrations into new political platforms, they managed to mobilize the masses for their skillfully amalgamated nationalist, socialist, and religious agendas.3 By adapting the old religious victimhood patterns to the imperial victims’ national and social injuries and by galvanizing their adherents for the war against their ‘perennial’ tyrants, these leaders succeeded in establishing post-imperial Europe’s, as it were, permanent state of exception. Their unprecedented unleashing of “state violence” stimulates Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence” to advocate the revolutionary self-exemption as the 3  The ideologically extremely hybrid populist profile of these charismatic interwar leaders was already prefigured by the politicians of disaggregating empires toward the end of the nineteenth century. See for example Schorske’s analysis of the “politics in a new key” (Schorske 116–180), in which he says for Georg von Schönerer that he “constructed his ideology out of attitudes and values from many eras and many social strata: aristocratic elitism and enlightened despotism, anti-Semitism and democracy, 1848 grossdeutsch democracy and Bismarckian nationalism, medieval chivalry and anti-Catholicism, and guild restrictions and state ownership of public utilities. Every one of these pairs of values the nineteenth-century liberal would have seen as contradictory. But there was a common denominator in this set of ideational fractions: total negation of the liberal elite and its values” (132).

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method of salvation from such a state of exception. He legitimates this selfexemption, in a typical maneuver of transference to the distant and inarticulate others, by postulating an allegedly prehistorical “pure violence”. However, by treating this pure violence as an unquestionable state of exception he surreptitiously exculpates the violence of the revolutionary self-exemption as its supposed resumption. This makes his argument into an involuntary mirror inversion of that of his political opponents. Whereas the engineers of the political state of exception promise a future bereft of differences, Benjamin, as the engineer of individual self-exemption, evokes an equally undifferentiated past. Like the first project’s abolition of differences, Benjamin’s abolition also relies on an endless postponement because the very violence that promises it repeatedly exempts itself from it. Since the distinction thus stubbornly reenters and subverts the promised indistinction, Benjamin’s critique ultimately takes recourse to a weak messianic guideline that might be formulated as: “Persist in your search for indistinction even if you can never reach it!” In accordance with it, he introduces into his argumentation numerous distinctions such as the one between pure (or divine, or revolutionary, or bloodless) violence and state (or mythic, or fateful, or bloody) violence—or between legislative and executive power, justice and law, and revelation and representation for that matter—only to deactivate them by a violence that itself escapes to such a deactivation. In such a way, this violence comes to be exempted from the same contaminating differentiation which it imposes upon all others. Positing an ethical obligation toward it, Benjamin establishes a moral community of the victims of political and social distinctions in the same way that we have seen his follower Agamben to be doing in his aftermath.4 In the post-imperial state of overall instability, uncertainty, and indeterminacy, he thus turns indistinction from a harsh fate imposed upon those relegated into its zone, into a godlike privilege for all creatures, a sort of a sacred state of exception. This results in a paradoxically passionate attachment to the inflicted dispossession. He titles his essay “Zur Kritik”, or “Toward a Critique”, because his critique, due to its endless deactivating meanderings in the name 4  Benjamin thereby resumes the gesture of French revolutionaries who, by positing a “moral community [of mankind] justified in terms of virtue” “set out to destroy the landmarks of the past, churches, castles, and the graves of the French kings at Saint-Denis” (Fritzsche 18) because they did not fit this moral community’s parameters. By raising the revolutionary groups and individuals to the status of a morally authorized assembly, Benjamin obliterates the devastating character of their liberation. I therefore agree with LaCapra’s claim that his essay is not so much exemplary, as Derrida reads it in “The Force of Law”, but rather symptomatic (LaCapra, “Gewalt, Gerechtigkeit und Gesetzeskraft” 160–161). It acts out his specific individual and group trauma.

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of this indistinction, amounts to an interminable abolition of all distinct identities, including that of the critic’s own self. Inasmuch as this critique’s horizon eschews ultimate identification, Benjamin assumes a distance from Kant’s proposal made in Critique of Pure Reason, to authorize it by the critic’s given present. Any such present is for him, an adherent of the Romanticist advocacy of victims, a traumatic constellation which the critic is invited to exempt himself or herself from in the name of those whom it bereaves of distinction. Anticipating Agamben, Benjamin therefore authorizes his own critique by the zones of indistinction, which he however, without using this specific term, disaggregates and transfers from the realm of collective political existence to the realm of individual memory. He speaks of individual “memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger” (“Über den Begriff” 253),5 meaning, by “danger”, the state of indistinction imposed upon this memory’s subject. Endangered memory takes possession of the respective subject by catapulting him or her out of this historical state and relegating him or her into the now-time ( Jetztzeit). Benjamin defines this now-time as an uncanny fusion of history’s divergent epochs, the far-removed “chips” of which suddenly reverberate with one another, entering curious “elective affinities”. Pressed by this divine spark of similarity into an unexpected proximity to one another, the indistinction of some suddenly ameliorates the indistinction of others. Thus the extraterritorial and extemporal now-time becomes the refuge for these frustrated subjects, which pulls them out of their traumatic constellations. It is in this context of a spontaneous interlocking of indistinct individual memories that Benjamin uncritically consecrates bare life (bloßes Leben), a concept that Agamben’s thesis of the modern proliferation of the zones of indistinction then continues to naturalize. Considering that zones of indistinction nurture the first works of what is today called ‘world literature’, Benjamin’s idea of interlocking memory chips deserves a closer reconstruction here. By dispersing the zone of indistinction it promises a more specific approach to the question of literature’s worlding. According to Benjamin no subject, due to his or her constitutively divided memory archive, fully belongs to his or her present time and space but partially also to the distant times and spaces that meet in the one and the same non-time and non-space. To explain how this functions, in his much later Baudelaire-essay (1939), Benjamin borrows the distinction between voluntary and involuntary memory from Bergson, Freud, and Proust. If voluntary memory connects a subject with his or her respective present, involuntary memory pulls him or her out of it into a plural and heterogeneous non-time and non-space in which s/he joins temporally and spatially distant subjects. Following this distinction between the voluntary 5  Translation from German and Serbian are by the author unless otherwise stated.

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Introduction

disconnection (Entbindung) from the ancestors in the name of the present and the involuntary (re)connection (Bindung) with them in the name of the future, Freud stated in his essay “Moses and Monotheism” (1939) that the human psychic life contains not only that which an individual has him/herself experienced but also the “pieces of phylogenetic origin” transmitted to him/ her at the moment of his/her birth. He called this inborn relationship with the “experiences of earlier generations”, this “inheriting of the memory traces” of “our ancestors”, an “archaic heritage” (“Der Mann Moses” 545–547). It draws the human being into an interminable chain of transmissions by reducing its distinction from the animal, for animals cannot really survive without inheriting their instincts from their ancestors. Freud’s idea of reuniting the human and animal beings in the subconscious dimension of survival (Überleben), as opposed to the conscious sphere of life (Leben) that separates them from one another, is very close to Benjamin’s project of de-anthropomorphizing the notion of life through that of survival and living-on (Überleben, Fortleben) (“Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers” 9). By opposing the then dominant philosophy of life inspired by the Enlightenment attachment to the present, Benjamin, in the wake of Romanticist addiction to the past, resolutely reconnects human life with its immemorial ‘animal’ origins. In his interpretation, life establishes a dense network of relations between its creatures, which they unconsciously depend on since it escapes their conscious insight and control. This network comes to expression in all of its subjects—the animate ones (such as humans and animal beings) and the inanimate ones (such as languages and artworks)—in the form of their constitutively escaping origin that subverts their autonomy and sovereignty. This is where Benjamin’s ‘bare life’—a counter-state of exception to the official political one as it were—finds its field of operation. It circulates through this infrastructure of involuntary memory archives that relates its creatures to one another in a non-identifiable time and space, enabling their selfexemptions from their presents. At stake is an all-encompassing network of corporeal memory archives, which embraces not only humans, animals, languages, artworks, and all kinds of phenomena and objects but also crosses spatial (such as geopolitical, cultural, and/or linguistic) and temporal (such as historical, epochal, and/or generational) borders. Benjamin’s all-embracing bare life enables the most divergent memory archives of its constituents to establish concordances, resemblances and ‘elective affinities’ with one another by means of spontaneous, instantaneous, and unpredictable ‘side leaps’ out of their particular locations. In sharp contrast to the goal-directed, unidirectional, and ordering history, this unconscious network of memory traces is dispersive, multidirectional, and vertiginous. One cannot trace it back to its origin because any origin proves to be a trace in itself, which leads to another

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origin, and so on. In The Origin of the German Tragic Drama, Benjamin accordingly evokes in the German word for the origin, der Ursprung, the etymological meaning of “primordial leap” (Der Ursprung 226). This implies that creatures and phenomena have their source not in an identity but, on the contrary, in a leap out of it into an endless network of relations. They contribute to the world-making from their very beginnings, even if they are unaware of or unwilling to accept this. Although Benjamin’s concept of bare life has the character of an unfinished draft, considering its universalist ambition I would risk the thesis that the sketched interlocking of involuntary memory traces is how he imagines the process which we today call globalization or worlding (mondialisation). Benjamin’s and Agamben’s concepts of an involuntary globalization rooted in an apparently universal bare life are well-fitted to counter the dominant systemic models of today. Especially Benjamin’s understanding of globalization as an unpredictable interlocking of dispersed historical victims’ memory archives substantially differs from its triumphant understanding as a Western strategical project. Opposing such a model of globalization from above, the postcolonial theorist Walter Mignolo proposed some time ago a model of globalization from below. Whereas the colonial model of globalization “connects from the center of the large circle outward, and leaves the outer places disconnected from each other”, the postcolonial model of globalization imagines “Western civilization as a large circle with a series of satellite circles intersecting the larger one”. It “connects the diverse subaltern satellites appropriating and transforming Western global designs” (Mignolo 765). Transferred into Benjamin’s and Agamben’s terms, globalization is conceived here as a mobile and heterogeneous network of relations within which the clandestine nonjuridical self-exemptions or unconscious memory archives, through their interlocking, continually subvert the public juridical state of exception or the official memory archive. Even if he does not go this far, considering the preliminary and sketchy character of his idea, Benjamin in fact alludes to this ineffable network of relations as the ultimate potential horizon of any particular memory when he says that in any memory an “immemorial prehistory […] murmurs” (“Über einige Motive bei Baudelaire” 640). By drawing memory into such an immemorial or murmuring zone, he wants to emphasize an ultimately indistinctive profile that resists all attempts to distinguish the subject to whom a particular memory ‘belongs’. In Novalis’s terms, no subject has a natural origin but only a retroactive and therefore artificial one (Schriften 1 253). In Freud’s terms, there is something uncanny or unhomely (das Unheimliche means both) in any memory archive that, under traumatic circumstances, unexpectedly steps out from its apocryphal, hidden existence (“Das Unheimliche” 232). Its sudden

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resurfacing disconcerts memory’s distinctive reality in the form of an indeterminate “sense of a déjà vu” (Empfindung des schon einmal Erlebthabens; Die Psychopathologie 295). In Benjamin’s closely affiliate terms, the necessary precondition for the sudden manifestation of the individual memory’s transindividual latency zone is the traumatizing depriving of human subjects of their “I”, “reflexive consciousness”, or “face” (Der Begriff der Kunstkritik 40; Der Ursprung 81, 218), all of which anchor them in their distinctive presents. The “expressionless” (ausdruckslos; “Goethes Wahlverwandschaften” 181), “undefinable” (undefinierbar; “Über einige Motive bei Baudelaire” 639), or “unapproachable” (unnahbar; 647) profile that they acquire through such a dispossession,6 mobilizes operations in their suppressed memory archives. These gradually activate the hitherto dormant connections with the distant subjects’ memories. Rising in the shadow of historical or personal catastrophes, in these defaced subjects the new and explosive “relation at a distance” thus wins the battle against the relation to familiar beings and phenomena in their immediate surroundings. In the splintered world after the First World War catastrophe, Benjamin’s marvelously abundant compensatory phantasy does not merely turn indistinction and dispossession into a privilege but makes them celebrate the ultimate triumph. This might be the reason why his and Agamben’s visions of ‘globalization from below’ have become so attractive for the alternative, postcolonial or posttraumatic conceptualizations of world literature. The latter criticize the large-scale systemic paradigms, which are characteristic of the colonialimperial model of globalization, for reducing temporally and spatially distant literatures and cultures to a market-driven common denominator.7 They use this ‘self-evident’ criterion to establish geographical, cultural, and/or axiological hierarchies between world literatures and cultures in the same manner that, for example, money establishes a hierarchy between various commodities’ values. Through such an all-equalizing systematization, they allocate to literatures and cultures their proportional distinctions, or determinate places, thus transforming their irreducible differences into the pure varieties of 6  This series of Benjamin’s negating attributes—expressionless, undefinable, unapproachable—indicates that self-exempting operations link the liberation with the annihilation of their subjects. In Dominick LaCapra’s critical view, they threaten to “disarticulate relations, confuse self and other, and collapse all distinctions” in a kind of “post-traumatic acting out” “caught up in a compulsive repetition of traumatic scenes” (Writing History 21). 7  I have taken issue with these paradigms in Tracing Global Democracy 33–56, 133–178, which is why I have skipped this discussion here and concentrated merely on the alternative paradigms.

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one and the same substance. This approach ‘from above’ ignores the literary works’ fundamental indistinction, which figures centrally in the alternative model of ‘globalization from below’. As Haun Saussy, one of the adherents of the latter model, cautioned, literary experience resists accommodation, location, or mapping because it “negates determinate space and time” (292). Following this thread, in her 2013 book Against World Literature, Emily Apter proposed a plurality of ‘untranslatable’ world literatures, an idea that was already underway when she published it, especially in the transdisciplinary field at the intersection of trauma and memory studies. Works such as Daniel Levy and Nathan Sznaider’s The Holocaust and Memory in a Global Age (2006), Michael Rothberg’s Multidirectional Memory (2009), Gabriele Schwab’s Haunting Legacies (2010), Azade Seyhan’s Writing outside Nation (2011), Ottmar Ette’s TransArea: Eine literarische Globalisierungsgeschichte (2012), and Marianne Hirsch’s The Generation of Post-Memory (2012) drew attention, firstly, to dispersed memories (in contrast to unified history) as the working field of modern literature, and, secondly, to the modern memory’s affiliative structures across the self-enclosed familial and national bonds. In an enlarged global arena that is nowadays structured by media networks and constituted through the flux of contacts between people and technologies, these authors claim that memories cross the perennial lines of difference, establishing correspondences and connections between isolated personal and group histories. Let me take a closer look at some of these intriguing works at the intersection of trauma and memory studies before I take issue with Apter’s proposal, which directly leans on Benjamin’s concept of untranslatability. Focusing on the histories of victims, Michael Rothberg discusses “transfers that take place between diverse places and times during the act of remembrance” (11), the ways in which traumatic memories’ unpredictable intersections initiate new alliances and collectivities. By opposing multidirectional with competitive memory, he highlights the former’s “nonappropriative hospitality to histories of the other” (Multidirectional 25). “I argue that far from blocking other historical memories from view in a competitive struggle for recognition, the emergence of Holocaust memory on a global scale”, by cutting across diverse spatial, temporal, and cultural sites, “has contributed to the articulation of other histories” (6). However, he realizes that his thesis of the nonappropriative opening of one traumatic memory toward its counterparts is contradicted by Freud’s thesis of “screen memory”, which states that, whenever we turn to other histories of suffering, we tend to suppress or obliterate our own history (13–14). Although Rothberg expresses his conviction that screen memories cannot prevent cross-referential acts of empathy and solidarity between memories, it should be recalled that Freud defined the Deckerinnerung, at least in its

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covering (verdeckende) version,8 as linked with repression, displacement, and inhibitions (“Über Deckerinnerungen” 536–537, 551). Following him, Marianne Hirsch described screen memories as “[t]he images already imprinted on our brains, the tropes and structures we bring from the present to the past, hoping to find them there and to have our questions answered”. In their transference to the memories of the others they “mask other images and other, as yet unthought or unthinkable, concerns” by remaining open only to that in other memories, which offers them a consolation. (Hirsch 42) Whereas Rothberg’s coalitional politics of multidirectional memories focuses only on the histories of victims, Gabriele Schwab’s intercultural dynamic of memory also includes the histories of perpetration. She claims that the “shock of recognizing the atrocities committed by one’s own people may prepare the ground for potential alliances with the victims” (27). It is easier for them to come to terms with their past if they displace this confrontation onto other histories of violence. Through an “engagement with other violent histories”, the confrontation with one’s own history becomes “psychically more manageable” (29). “I am indeed arguing that histories of violence can be put in a dialogic relationship with one another, thus creating a transferential dynamic for those who participate in, witness, or inherit those histories transgenerationally” (29). This means that memories “are always already composites of dynamically interrelated and conflicted histories”, “conflicting fields” of “transversal encounters” (30). Such palimpsestic rendering of memory takes into account the “increasing global interdependency”, “the fact that we live at the intersections of so many histories of violence that the trauma we experience may well be compared to a ‘cumulative trauma’ ” (31). Schwab’s principal thesis is that only “through the detour of displaced yet related memories of violence” can we engage in a proper working through of our own past or a “true politics of mourning” (31). She agrees with Judith Butler who asserts that “struggle must be waged against those forces that seek to regulate affect in differential ways” (Frames of War 52), i.e. through an identitarian memory politics. Nevertheless, how does this activist ethical program accord with her thesis that “much of how we process violent histories is bound to operate on an unconscious level” because of our traumatic amnesia or powerful defense mechanisms based on our feelings of shame and guilt (30)? Does the grade of our responsiveness to suffering at a distance come as a result of our personal willingness and readiness or, probably, the different grade and kind of room for maneuver that is allocated to us in the network of global interdependencies, i.e. from the state 8  According to Freud, there is also a more positive, i.e. covered (verdeckte) version of screen memories.

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of affairs that we cannot be held responsible for? If the starting positions are unavoidably immensely different, do we not inappropriately level them down by confronting them all with the same ethical imperative? And does such an inconsiderate equalization not remind us of systemic approaches? The same neglect of mechanisms that unconsciously screen a traumatized memory’s opening toward other memories characterizes the argument of Marianne Hirsch, another instructive theorist of the plural networking from below. She realizes that intersecting memories tend to “occlude or erase each other”, confronting their researcher with the task “to turn competitive or appropriative memory into more capacious transnational memory work”, in order to prevent this from happening (Hirsch 20–21). Her proposal is to think “different historical experiences in relation to one another to see what vantage points they might share or offer each other” (24–25), or to juxtapose ones with others to reconfigure their apparent indifference. Hence their linking and superimposing is intended to provide them with alternative possibilities of knowing that would otherwise escape them. However, Hirsch is aware that memories offer resistance to such a broadening of their familiar horizon since they passionately adhere to it. To underpin this, right at the beginning of her argument, she distinguishes between memory as a personally embodied knowledge and postmemory as a knowledge that is inherited at a generational remove and therefore transferred and traumatic (1–5). Whereas memory belongs to those who have lived an event, “post” implies a troubling continuity: we are distanced from that which we are profoundly interrelated with. Due to traumas, wars, exterminations, exile, and refugeehood, today people live in a world of ruptured continuities and broken heritage lines. Postmemorial work is engaged to counteract this loss of the once familiar past (32–33). According to Hirsch, there are two ways to deal with this traumatic condition with which we are faced. The first is familial postmemory, a defense reaction that is at pains to reestablish an affective connection with the family past that was violently destroyed by history. This kind of postmemory endeavors to regain possession of the ‘living’ relationship to others, for example through literature, photography, and testimony (32–33). The second way is affiliative postmemory that is oriented toward establishing, via various technologies and social institutions, connections with distant, unknown yet affiliate beings in order to encompass a larger collective in a web of transmission (35–36). Although many people stick to the first option, i.e. tending to retrieve the sense of family and safety by projecting an image of family onto emerging affiliative institutions, in Hirsch’s view, such family pictures operate as screen memories that mask an unbearable visual landscape too difficult to look at. They are retroactive and wishful projections of the world before its destruction (51–52).

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Therefore, like Schwab, she opts for affiliative postmemory which exposes the disjunction, incongruity and incommensurability between the present and the past (63). Despite their different distribution of accents, Rothberg’s, Schwab’s and Hirsch’s arguments correspond in their prioritizing of the self’s “nonappropriative” identification with the distant others over the self’s “appropriative” identification of others as familiar beings. In the posttraumatic situation of enforced unhomeliness in which we live today, their thesis reads, experiencing the other as a permanent invitation to our self-exemption is a more appropriate option than experiencing him or her as an object for our self-assertion. In my view, there are two principal problems with this argument. The first is that it distinguishes between the ‘mythical’ world before the apocalypse and the historical one after it, and the second is that it renders two kinds of identification as freely available alternatives. I believe that, on the contrary, the self’s appropriation of the other and the self’s transposition into the other are, from the very beginning of human phylogenetic and ontogenetic history, not free but compulsive and not separable but interdependent operations. In Tracing Global Democracy, I have discussed them, in terms of phylogenetic history, under the labels of Roman imperial and Greek elitist cosmopolitanism, and in the frame of ontogenetic history, under the psychoanalytic labels of libidinal desire for the other-as-object and emotional identification with the other-asmodel (Tracing 17–18, 20, 57, 83). It turned out that, since one is conscious and the other preconscious, they do not ‘dialogically interact’ as two autonomous operations but one operation acts as the other’s suppressed enabler/disabler. Such a peculiar disjunctive conjunction between them calls into question not only their historical succession—before and after the apocalypse—but also the proclaimed autonomy of each of them. Since one kind of identification smuggles itself into the unconscious zone of the other, this indistinctive zone haunts, disturbs, and contaminates the respective identification’s autonomy and distinction. Hence pace Hirsch, it is not so that memory comes first as the embodied knowledge of those who have lived through an event, and postmemory comes second as the traumatic knowledge of those whose continuity with the event has been violently ruptured. Living an event does not mean introjecting it without any social mediation on our part. Suffice to recall Lacan’s warning that the total symbolic net envelops human life long before a human being enters the world (Écrits 279) or Althusser’s reminder that each human is always a subject, even before his/her birth, predestined to become such by his/her firmly ideologically structured family configuration (128). No family offers a safe transhistorical shelter to its members without simultaneously

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imparting its historical restrictions upon them, which means that trauma already inheres to family rather than being simply inflicted on it by history. Even if personal memory is often engaged against historical traumas, this does not mean that its “affect, embodiment, privacy, and intimacy” (Hirsch 16) are protected from the influence of history. Despite the memorizers’ projections of their personal oases of freedom, their memories are necessarily shaped by historical tensions, conflicts, and ruptures. This is how the self’s preconscious identification with the distant others contaminates his or her identification of others as familiar beings. The same hybridization holds for the apparently nonappropriative identification with inarticulate distant others. Their defaced, spectral appearance has first to be domesticated through the attribution of a familiar face and voice, i.e. the assignment of a home to their unhomeliness. By appropriating the distant others in such a preconscious fashion, the self makes his or her identificationas, or self-assertion, into the hideous prerequisite of his or her identificationwith, or self-exemption. To give an example from my Tracing Global Democracy, Kant only identified with all the diverse members of Menschenrasse after he had made this human race into an embodiment of the divine ratio. Using the Enlightened ideal of rationality as a ‘self-evident’ criterion, he then distinguished not only between the human and animal races but also between rational and irrational human beings, such as women, children, and barbarians. In the final analysis, he abandoned all individual or collective subjects who proved themselves unable of meeting this ideal to all kinds of sufferings connected with this failure. He did not hesitate to consider them responsible for such ‘immaturity’ (Tracing 14). I interpret such a tacit and discriminatory introduction of one kind of identification into the other as the unconscious establishment of a zone of indistinction, which becomes a ferment that persistently haunts and disturbs the achieved distinction. Instead of relegating identification-as into the pretraumatic realm of distinction and identification-with into the post-traumatic realm of indistinction—i.e. separating them from one another by a traumatic event as Rothberg, Schwab, and Hirsch do—I thus make distinction and indistinction into closely interdependent incommensurables. They meet in a disjunctive conjunction of agencies and enablers that is, as I have spelled out at length in Tracing Global Democracy, genuine to all traumatic constellations (Tracing 5–6, 70–72). Due to the imparity at their core, such constellations are merely potential generators of trauma. That which one group of their constituencies experiences as trauma is neither in nature nor in degree a universal experience. Put in the frame of a constellation, traumas are instead multilateral constructs, which come into being “in circumstances [people] have not

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Introduction

themselves created and which they do not fully comprehend” (Alexander 4). How traumatized they will feel depends on how they, at a given moment, experience their situation located at the intersections of various axes of distinction (or homeliness) and indistinction (or unhomeliness). While people feel to be at home with regard to one group of the constellation’s constituencies, they can simultaneously feel to be not-at-home with regard to another such group. This feeling, although sometimes knowingly devastating, is not a homogeneous given but a complex and changeable variable. This means that the concept of traumatic constellation prevents either homeliness or unhomeliness from becoming, each for its part, a universal condition of all world’s constituencies. The homeliness, which generates identification-as or self-assertion, and the unhomeliness, which generates identification-with or self-exemption, are instead taken to be closely interrelated but incommensurable projects of the world’s commonality. If we conceive the world as a traumatic constellation, this disjunctive conjunction permeates each and every one of its innumerous and manifold constituencies. This is why, within it, one type of commonality cannot but be launched at the expense of another. In order for one constituency that pursues one type of commonality to acquire distinction, the other constituency that pursues the other type must be banished into indistinction and unhomeliness. In these terms, the world would be no longer interpreted as a consensual space but a dissensual one that underlies (re)configuration from any of its equally asymmetric regional constellations, in the same way that these constellations are persistently reconfigured by national, social, and individual constellations as their internally divided constituents. There would be no one world but rather many nodes of its overall network that align with some against others in their political efforts to adapt the whole, or at least their particular segment, to their specific needs. To the degree to which one such node manages to acquire worldliness, it sentences other nodes to unworldliness. This is the point at which my rendering of literature’s worlding takes distance from Emily Apter’s advocacy of many incommensurable world literatures. She makes Benjamin’s concept of untranslatability from his essay “The Task of the Translator” (1923), which was elaborated by a number of its commentators, into the main principle of literature’s worlding. Like languages and cultures, literatures and literary works, her thesis reads, are also untranslatable into one another. This is not because each of them is singular and unique but because their common denominator is missing. In his earlier essay “On Language as Such and on the Languages of Man” (1916), Benjamin stated that the languages of men emerged after the collapse of the language as such, a breakdown that was accompanied by the fall from the linguistic mode of

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revelation (Offenbarung) into that of communication (Mitteilung). However, since Mitteilung besides “communicating” also means “sharing with”, all “languages of man” necessarily share with one another the “language as such” to which they once belonged. As this language does not “mean or express anything” and extinguishes “all information, all sense, and all intention” (“The Task” 81), it resists communication. If the translation wants to assure an afterlife for it—and this is, after Benjamin, what it is all about—it has to mime this language of truth as the generator of the untranslatability of human tongues. By miming the language of truth as the missing unifier of the languages of men, the translation “makes visible” the fleeting “reciprocal relationship between languages”, their “kinship” and “convergence” (77); it shows how “interrelated” they are “in what they want to express” (77); and it lets both its own language and that of the original “undergo a change”, a “maturing process”, which assures them afterlife and “abundant flowering” (77). Benjamin thus endows the translation with the “special mission” (78) of “a transformation and a renewal” of both languages (77). We learn from his later essay “Doctrine of the Similar” (1933) that its ethical task is to enliven in alienated human tongues the remnants of the language of truth as repositories of the “most fleeting and refined substances” (“Doctrine” 68). In such a manner, translations raise their originals “into a higher and purer linguistic air” (“The Task” 79). Ultimately—and we are now approaching the only spot at which the concept of untranslatability appears in Benjamin’s essay— “meaning attaches to them” so fleetingly that they “prove to be untranslatable” (82). What Benjamin wants to say is that their mode of intention (die Art des Meinens) goes far beyond the object intended by their producers or users (das Gemeinte). This can be compared with the way in which life goes far beyond its manifestations. Once drawn into the process of proper translation, human tongues cannot control their modes of intention because they are, firstly, “in a constant state of flux” and, secondly, continuously supplement each other (78). They do not envelop their content naturally, like the skin of a fruit, but artificially, like a “royal robe with ample folds” over the body of a king (79). Put in terms of Benjamin’s other simile, they let their sense resonate as loosely as the wind makes “an Aeolian harp” resonate with its touch (82). It is precisely this highly elusive “mode of intention” or horizon of latency that makes languages untranslatable, even if these languages’ users ceaselessly translate them into “intended objects”. In fact, with regard to this fleetingness connected with their horizon of latency, Benjamin’s essay draws a systematic parallel between languages and artworks. To point out the degree to which the mode of intention genuine to artworks also goes far beyond the object intended by their authors and receivers, he already states in the first paragraph that “no poem is intended

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Introduction

for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener” (75). Their sense transcends their meaning. It is this parallel, I would say, that stimulates Apter to rethink world literature in the frame of translation studies. She insisted in The Translation Zone that literary works cease to belong to single, discrete languages, becoming fleeting and untranslatable to the degree to which they are forced by various historical traumas to enter “a perpetual state of in-translation” (The Translation Zone 6–7). However, Benjamin cautions that fleetingness is not equally distributed among artworks and languages, but depends on their ability to activate the “element that does not lend itself to translation” of their originals (79). In fact, the originals prolong their life only to the degree that their untranslatability, placed beyond the horizon of their producers, gets translated. Benjamin warns that the translational activity retains its “possibly foremost significance” if it is not focused “exclusively on man” but rescues from oblivion that which men “proved unable to translate” (76). It does not serve men but rather life, the transmission of which the artworks are better qualified to take care of than creatures (76), languages better than their users, and some languages better than the others that lead the undignified life of pure information (82). Not everything is “credited with life”, Benjamin tells us, but only that which has “a history of its own, and is not merely the setting for history” (76). To have a history of one’s own means to be able to assure “potentially eternal afterlife in succeeding generations” (77). Nobody will translate a work that has not “reached the age of its fame” (77), i.e. exempted itself from history and determinate location into the extratemporal and extraterritorial now-time. Untranslatable as it is, life establishes clear criteria of translatability for its manifestations. Only those that foster its uncanny or unhomely stream of becoming deserve this afterlife; those who fall as its victims do not. This means that with life—and the language of truth as its representative—Benjamin introduces a divine horizon that enjoys an unquestioned ‘state of exception’. From this extraordinarily privileged position, this divine ‘state of exception’ establishes a clear hierarchy of its manifestations within the human ‘regular state’. Since Absent God can announce itself merely “in an indirect and negative way” (Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking” 146), the more indirect and negative a given manifestation comes to be and the more intense feeling of unhomeliness it induces, the higher reputation it enjoys in Benjamin’s and Apter’s view. This is why Apter in her earlier works favors, with Homi Bhabha, literature of exilic consciousness characterized by non-consensual terms of affiliation, hybridity, liminality, and in-betweenness (Bhabha 12–13; Apter, “Comparative Exile” 92). Along the same lines, in Against World Literature she focuses on literature that emerges from a translation failure, mistranslation, the contresense,

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the unsayable, the inexpressible, and the nonsensical (Against World Literature 9–11). Both she and Benjamin authorize only such a translation of life into its manifestation that fosters and proliferates life’s interminable labyrinths. Inasmuch as such translation “belongs fully to no one” but life that negates all property, it is for Apter “a model of deowned literature” (15) or “screwed-up literature” that turns the world of properties upside down (18). In accordance with this, literature is celebrated to the degree to which it exempts itself from the given determinate into a distant and indeterminate world. In sum, while it argues against the large-scale systemic projects of world literature because they allocate literatures and works their determinate location, Apter’s rethink of world literature is itself centered on another common denominator, i.e. an unhomeliness that is, although conceived in inverse terms, no less discriminatory. Promoting unhomeliness into the universal condition of the world’s constituencies, it maps the world not as a space of dissent but, typical of the weak messianic tradition, as that of a postponed consensus. Whereas the systemic common denominator of world literature operates in self-asserting terms, this alternative weak messianic denominator operates in self-exempting terms. This means that both, in the final analysis, deny the world attribute to literatures that follow opposed terms. Instead of dismantling the discriminatory politics of literature itself in the bifurcated process of its worlding, both systemic and messianic projects thus compulsively reenact it. I introduce the concept of a traumatic constellation in order to avoid this repetition of discrimination. Instead of opposing to one another the identification of the other as the self (i.e. the identification-as or self-assertion) and the identification of the self as the other (i.e. the identification-with or selfexemption), traumatic constellation establishes a relationship of disjunctive conjunction between them. In such a way, they become closely interdependent incommensurables. This means that, by privileging one type of identification and by looking for allies and adherents in order to institute it, a given literary work necessarily operates at the expense of the other type of identification, which makes its liberating politics gradually slip into an imposed police. With “politics” and “police” I am referring to Jacques Rancière’s well-known dissymmetry. In his terms, this tacit metamorphosis of politics into a police takes place while an emancipating activity institutes a platform of commonality (Rancière, On the Shores 11–20; Disagreement 21–42, 61–64). Of course, such an often invisible transformation is by no means reserved for literature but characterizes all political agencies. As I have tried to show, it smuggles itself into Benjamin’s arguments and, in a compulsive reenactment of his theses, also into Agamben’s and finally Apter’s arguments in favor of a consistent self-exemption. The intention of the concept of traumatic constellation is to

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circumvent such an involuntary entrapment into the alternative discriminatory patterns by instead examining what drives literature, in given historical and political circumstances, into accepting their bifurcating terms. This means that, in my view, the task of the researcher of literature’s worlding is not to subsume the dissensus that underlies it under consensus about what world literature actually is since this would amount to a policing or “democratic despotism” (Rancière, Hatred of Democracy 20). I advocate instead the politics of research, which implies readdressing, reaffirming and reinstating this dissensus. Following Rancière’s understanding of democracy, the disagreement between two paths of globalization—the one from above and the one from below—does not precede the problem-solving establishment of consensus but follows it and ensues from it (Rancière, Disagreement 27). This is because, in this conception, the world is not a desired state but a permanent practice of highlighting the denial inherent in its political representations— and literature is but one of these representations. Persistently enacting the right to have rights, the world is never accomplished but has to be continuously implemented, untiringly opening its public space up to its suppressed and otherwise missed possibilities, creating possibilities for the emergence of new forms of participation, new accommodations and new agencies within it. This is why world literature’s systematic production of dispossessed alterity, as well as its consistent perpetuation of an inferior alternative, must not be obliterated but untiringly disclosed. It is along these lines that I will argue in the forthcoming chapters. To examine the bifurcation of globalization patterns that literary authors spontaneously enact within the constellations in which they are doomed to operate, in this book I focus on late imperial and post-imperial Europe immediately before and in the aftermath of the First World War. During these decades, the region underwent an extensive geopolitical reconfiguration that spawned successor states such as Austria, Germany, Hungary, and Turkey, new nation states like Bulgaria, Poland, and Romania, and multinational states like Czechoslovakia and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. East Central Europe’s post-imperial re-mapping resulted in highly turbulent political, social and economic environments, characterized by huge imbalances, instability and uncertainty. Under such unstable conditions, new petty sovereigns managed to mobilize the masses for their nationalist, communist, populist, fascist and/or anti-Semitic agendas. To achieve this, they revivified the memory of the founders of the great religions whose martyrdom once mobilized the frustration of various imperial victims by attracting them to join the newly forged communities of believers. In order to disengage the still active enlightened bourgeois narratives at the beginning of the twentieth century, they even

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rigidified these past religious patterns by adapting them to the new victims’ pains, shaping new enemies and energizing the masses for the war against them. As a consequence, the deeply rooted religious patterns amalgamated with the new socialist, fascist, and nationalist sacrificial agendas by introducing the peculiar hybrid formations that indistinguishably merged the ‘progressive’ and ‘retrograde’ elements into one another that had previously been kept strictly apart. However these political sacrificial narratives that gradually achieved the status of being the foundational myths of the new ‘imagined communities’ constitute this book’s orchestrating background rather than its main topic. Their mutual competition shapes the typically post-imperial traumatic constellation with many intersecting and overlapping asymmetries that generate discontent, frustrations, and anxieties in its midst. I interpret this dramatic tableau as the less investigated European announcer of the incomparably better researched non-European post-colonial constellation. Within the forces that structure it, however, my principal interest is with literary sacrificial narratives. They are firmly enmeshed in the post-imperial constellation’s axes, placed at its “zones of indistiction”, but develop much subtler ‘technologies of the self’ to escape the delineated political narratives’ strictly bipolar technologies. Their usual trigger is, as Lauren Berlant terms it, “a sense of the uncanny” or “free-floating anxiety” in “the situation of being without genre” (Berlant 80). In Elisabeth Povinelli’s terms, a series of quasi-events that usually saturate the given constellation’s potential worlds without being noticed, begin to aggregate and become apprehended, evaluated and grasped as ethical and political demands (Povinelli 3–4, 13). Veena Das speaks about the “poisonous knowledge” acquired by literary authors in shattered social relationships (Das 54) in which an “encounter with pain is not a one-shot, arm’s length transaction” (90). To prevent this suppressed knowledge contagiously spreading into everyday reality, their imaginary projects re-inhabit their infected community, rename its anonymous spaces, and recraft its signs of subjection (62). Therein consists the venture of a number of outstanding post-imperial European writers. The accelerated political developments in the aftermath of the First World War catapult their hitherto homogeneous and restricted life experiences into a heterogeneous global horizon of unhomeliness. In 1933, after Hitler’s seizure of power in Germany, which forced him into exile, Benjamin addressed the Great War generation’s completely erased prewar experience. They suddenly found themselves deprived of all habitual footholds of orientation, standing “in the open air in a landscape in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds, and in the center, in a force field of destructive currents and explosions, the tiny frail human body” (“Erfahrung und Armut”

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Introduction

291). This “tiny frail human body” unwittingly but ominously anticipates the upcoming fate of the Jews whose distinct identities were, in an enormously accelerated tempo, reduced to bare life. In the Austrian part of disaggregating imperial Europe in 1917, another Jew who had been put under pressure, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, stated that “the nature [Wesen] of our age is ambiguity [Vieldeutigkeit] and indeterminacy. It rests only on the slippery [dem Gleitenden] […]. A slight chronic dizziness vibrates in it” (“Der Dichter” 60). In such exceptional states, which enormously increase their victims’ sensibility for the latent, non-materialized possibilities of their present, Hofmannsthal sees as his task to express “that which does not exist anymore, which does not exist yet, which could be, but in the first place that which never happened, the sheer impossible and therefore beyond all real” (“Wert und Ehre” 132). For him, language is a “huge, fathomlessly profound empire of the dead, which is why we receive from it the highest life” (“Wert und Ehre” 132). The Russian philosopher and literary scholar Mikhail Bakhtin, situated at yet another traumatic sub-constellation of the same East-Central European constellation, similarly concludes in his notes from the end of 1930s: Vast, unlimited, masses of forgotten meanings participate in each particular moment of the dialogic development, but at the given moment of the dialogue’s later course they will be recalled, relived, in a renewed context and aspect. There is nothing absolutely dead; every meaning will experience the holiday of its rebirth. Estetika 373

All three intellectuals clandestinely oppose the radical national and social revolutions of their time that aimed at their carriers’ and supporters’ final political liberation, elaborating instead the therapeutic project of a “conservative revolution” (Hofmannsthal, “Das Schrifttum” 37, 41), which was committed to this envisaged liberation’s victims. According to Hofmannsthal, the poet’s task is to take the position of an entirely deprived being exposed to enormous denigration and suffering by placing himself at this being’s service (“Der Dichter” 66–68).9 Hofmannsthal confers nothing less than the mission of redeeming the “suffering of the thousands” upon him (70–71). Polemicizing against the radical revolutionary program orientated toward an ultimate “glorious day” of both the Nazis and the contemporary social democracy, Benjamin designated his own program as the “weak messianic”, i.e. systematically postponing one (“Über den Begriff der Geschichte” 252). Like that of Hofmannsthal and 9  Hofmannsthal speaks about der Dichter, excluding the possibility of imagining a female poet.

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Bakhtin, it was firmly committed to the memorizing of revolutions’ victims. For this sake it systematically bracketed out the strong messianism’s ‘final solution’ that is associated with the Messiah’s ultimate arrival. It is impossible to accomplish salvation in the given world’s terms because—as Ludwig Wittgenstein, another important contemporary of Jewish roots, significantly put it in his Tractatus (1922)—“[t]he sense of the world must lie outside the world” (Tractatus 6.41). That is to say, the ultimate sense of any world phenomenon, including the self, lies in a zone exempted from this world’s distinctions. The differences between their world-views and modes of thinking notwithstanding, Benjamin, Hofmannsthal, Bakhtin, and Wittgenstein make this sense “into an absolute, which was untouchable, either by the soul merchants or any accidents of birth” (Beller 235). To beat all discriminating earthly states of exception, they promote it to the status of a transcendental and indiscriminating state of exception. By saving it from the deeply compartmentalized world, they place it beyond the limited criteria of worldly proof. The same elimination of small discriminations in favor of a big and unbridgeable one undertakes Robert Musil in his portrait of a “man without qualities” from the introductory part of his famous novel. He therein detects a political disaggregation of every citizen’s identity into a constellation of nine characters that “dissolve him and he is really nothing but a little channel washed out by all these trickling streams, which flow into it and drain out of it again in order to join other little streams filling another channel”. However, beyond that, every dweller on earth also has a tenth character […]. This interior space—which, it must be admitted, is difficult to describe—is of a different shade and shape in Italy from what it is in England, because everything that stands out in relief against it is of a different shade and shape; and yet, both here and there it is the same, merely an empty, invisible space with reality standing in the middle of it like a little toy brick town, abandoned by the imagination. Musil 34

The political identity is bereft of essence because this interior space “without qualities”, in which a “difficult to describe” “soul” resides, absorbs all identity aspects into its void and continually rearranges the relation between them. Due to such a state of affairs, “every dweller on earth” ultimately becomes a “man without qualities”, which subjects his/her multiple coexisting loyalties to an interminable reconfiguration and cuts him/her off from his/her fellow beings. As Musil demonstrates in his novel, the soul bridges huge distances between the oceans and continents with ease but finds it very difficult to establish contacts

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with “the souls accommodated behind the next corner” (Musil 220). But it might be that Musil’s insight primarily reflected a specifically post-Habsburg indecisive mentality (Bahr 153; Menasse 16–17) rather than that of “every dweller on earth”. Hugo von Hofmannsthal confirms this suspicion when, in his analysis of Austrian identity from 1917, he highlights an “inclination toward the unclear”, “self-irony” and “characterlessness” (“Die österreichische Idee” 460– 461). Moreover, this general Austrian inclination finds its exemplification in his self-analysis from “A Letter of Lord Chandos”: “I feel an enchanting, absolutely infinite counterpoint in me and around me, and among the mutually counteracting matters there is not a single one into which I could not pour myself” (“Erzählungen” 185). The extent to which Hofmannsthal is driven by his need to transpose himself into the unknown others is reflected in the fact that even this self-analysis is itself performed by his historically remote Doppelgänger Lord Chandos. However, as I have already pointed out, one does not identify with distant others without having previously tamed their threatening indistinctiveness through one’s wishful projections. The reorientation of Hofmannsthal’s sympathies from the Germans to the Slavs does not uncover its true background before one considers its coincidence with the rise of German antisemitism in his country. In fact, he engages the Slavs as his multiple allies because they have to resist the pressure of the Austrians in the same way as the Austrians have to resist that of the Germans and the Austrian Jews that of the Austrian Germans. Following these elective affinities, Hofmannsthal endorses Herder who resolutely rejected the West European animosity toward the Slavs (Nodia 18–20). As the Slavs still live in the infantile, mythic phase of human history, they can help the riper European nations recall their childhood, rejuvenate and, thus, reintegrate themselves. In other words, the domination of German culture had to be maintained through a revitalizing appropriation of Slavic cultures. Hofmannsthal’s wartime and postwar Austro-Slavism thus epitomizes the so-called regenerative attitude to Eastern ‘barbarians’, which was introduced in the Austro-Hungarian Empire as a civilizing mission that had to compensate for the loss of the Austrian political hegemony in Germany after the defeat at Königgrätz in 1866. They were thus recognized only as long as their supposed inferiority nurtured their masters’ feelings of superiority. Such a ‘paternal despotism’, celebrated by Marx and Engels as the best way to administering the Slav ‘peoples without history’, comes to expression in his 1915 essay “The Noble Knight Prince Eugen” in which, to compensate for the Austrian army’s bitter defeats in Serbia and Galicia, he glorifies the victorious Habsburg general Prince Eugen of Savoy (1663–1736). “These peoples, claims Hofmannsthal, even benefited from their bondage as he led them by his wise

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and skillful rule to economic prosperity and a homogeneous community of peoples” (Nodia 63). Hofmannsthal’s identification with the Slavs is therefore firmly coupled with his deeply entrenched assumption about their inferiority. They are maybe as weak as the Jews in comparison to the Austrians, and the Austrians in comparison to the Germans, but, nevertheless, a sacrificial community composed of these weak entities, with the aim of strengthening them, does not amount to equality. The paternal care on which it rests reintroduces discrimination. So it is no wonder that the apparently generous Austro-Slavism confronted the resistance of the Slavs, who felt denigrated to a condition of amorphousness and indistinction within the offered ‘alliance’. While the projected ‘community of the weak’ across national, linguistic, and cultural barriers increased the Austrian future’s vibrant potentiality, it simultaneously relegated the Slavs to the pockets of a “past perfect being” (Povinelli 27). Among other tasks allocated to the Slavs, Hofmannsthal expected them to assist their West European masters in eliminating the horrible consequences of their steadily increasing control of nature, such as an unspeakable relativism, a questioning of all and everything, a caustic irony, an all-pervading criticism, a persistent doubting of language, and the taking of money as the supreme measure of worth (“Die Idee Europa” 48–49). Drawing on Slavic community-oriented values, the Austrian poet “awakens the primordial powers of the people […], something that is more important than individuals” by adjusting “all that is strange and irreconcilable in a human being” and by helping the “diversity and contradictions of the world” reestablish their lost unity (52, 50). Hofmannsthal therefore engages Slavic cultures to recuperate the obliterated imperial character of German culture and thus prevent its future disintegration. Whatever endangers his project of communal harmony in these cultures—all discordant facts that disturb the therapeutic ideal made out of them—undergoes reckless elimination (Nodia 28). Fully ignored in their claim for national distinction, the Slavs are welcome only inasmuch as they enable the Austrian compensatory myth of the ‘proper’ imperial self. This is why Hofmannsthal, in his lyric comedy Arabella, portrays the Croat Mandryka as a land owner who masters his possession in a sovereign manner. He epitomizes a harmonious community which Austrian noblemen appear to be cut off from, having been drawn long ago into a highly differentiated and perplexing urban society. The social whole they belong to escapes them entirely, whereas Mandryka comfortably keeps it under his ‘fatherly’ control. He displays an almost aristocratic self-consciousness that not only tranquilly looks after his ‘inanimate’ possessions—the villages, fields, river and forest—but also his ‘animate’ belongings such as his “four thousands subjects” and his three

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Introduction

servants, the body-hussar (Leibhusar) Welko, the body-Gypsy (Leibzigeuner) Djura, and the body-Jew (Leibjude) Jankel, who all “pray for his happiness” (Arabella 536–537). The varied ethnic composition of Mandryka’s staff is, of course, not accidental but rather symbolizes the Monarchy’s peripheral or, more accurately, marginal populations. These outcasts, performing everything he commands, act as the executors of his will. This is, in Hofmannsthal’s view, how the Empire’s outskirts ought to behave in gratitude for the Emperor’s paternal care but, at the same time, how an Austrian nobleman ought to behave to them. Mandryka embodies the generous attitude that the paternal Emperor demonstrated toward the remotest imperial periphery. Since a foreigner is thus elevated to a mythical sphere, it is small wonder that nobody really knows his exact location, be it “Hungary or Wallachia” (Arabella 525), “Sissek” (537), or “Slavonia” (545). Any such specification would eliminate his ‘threatening allure’ genuine of the ‘noble savage’. To enable the therapy of a traumatized Austrian Jew, he must remain indistinct. Only if he is de-personalized, turned into a foggy stereotype, can he function as an inexhaustible source of “poetic productivity”, as German Romanticists, its inventors, have envisaged. Any specifications ought to undermine the power of the invented myth, which is why they are circumvented. It is this ‘screening’ kind of the Austrian-Jewish identification with the indiscriminate Slavs that invokes the latter’s bitter reaction. In a poetic comedy roughly contemporaneous to Arabella, the Serbian writer Miloš Crnjanski introduces a number of Serbian figures within the jovial atmosphere of 1860s Viennese salons. Like the Croat Mandryka, they are only tolerated to the extent of their sexual, military or financial exploitability but are then rejected as soon as they show pretensions to an acknowledged social status. The Serbian politicians are taken to be incurably naive (Maska 28–29) and their artists either do not fit the fashionable musical taste (38) or write poetry in an exotic language that Austrians cannot understand (34). In fact, since the Serbs take on a group appearance, they are stigmatized by an Austrian nobleman as “le bagage de prince Mihail” (35), with Prince Michael being the leading figure of their émigré circle. Such an indistinct ethnic presentation—shown through its additional ‘barbarous’ tendency toward assimilation into an even more amorphous ‘Slavic assemblage’ under Russian patronage (39, 47)—counterbalances the literary distinguished individual profile of Austrian figures. No one mentions Byron, Winckelmann, or Hugo in reference to the Serbs, which would associate them with the European cultural space, but instead odd geopolitical locations such as Srem, Stražilovo, and Fruška gora, which rivet them to their exotic land and their respectively regional national destiny. When the General’s wife says she will send the Serbian poet Branko Vigny’s La mort du

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loup, Daničić immediately responds that “[t]hat’s not for him” because he is not a learned but “natural” poet (Maska 34). What else could one expect from the representative of “le bagage de prince Mihail” who cannot but compose “village poetry” (34–35)? Such a stigmatizing approach drives Serbian characters to exempt themselves from the carnal atmosphere of the Viennese carnival into a sacrificial, eternal, almost heavenly community with distant beings. Their leader Branko is a poet who, by definition, apostrophizes constitutively absent addressees rather than directly addressing extant interlocutors. The composer Stanković proceeds in the same way since, despising the jovial musical forms of his contemporaries, he dedicates his music to the dead (Maska 45). Branko admires him because he himself is Pierrot’s double, i.e. death’s messenger dressed up in black, terminally ill and prepared to die soon (37). Therefore, all of the time, he addresses ‘eternity’ rather than the petty earthly preoccupations of his interlocutors. “Some cry idealism, the others communism, and I: etherism” (45). At the play’s very beginning, anticipating his own suicide at its end, the half-Serb half-Russian character Cesare states: How does Branko put it? Dying early is not unhappy nor nasty, no, it is actually an honor. (19) It is not just Cesare who appreciates Branko’s self-sacrificial stance. The Serbian philologist Daničić speaks about Branko’s determination with great admiration (32–35). But, beyond the characters within the play, Branko’s greatest admirer was the young Crnjanski himself who, in the immediate aftermath of the First World War, when he finished this comedy, shared his contempt for earthly values and his attachment to transcendent ones. Branko’s “etherism”, as generated by the escapism of “his soul” (Maska 45), parallels Crnjanski’s “sumatraism”, which equally rises from the “depths of his soul” (“Objašnjenje ‘Sumatre’ ” 153). Both celebrate the insignificance of individuals in the face of natural appearances such as the heavens, waters, winds, and mountains. If these humans and appearances are weak and unnoticeable under given circumstances, myriads of invisible links between them, across the epochs and around the globe, make them powerful and important. This is how “the power of the weak” comes into being in Crnjanski’s work—via the “oceanic feeling” of an “ecstatic community” in which, through a sacrificial self-dissolution, the border between the self and the universe disappears. This is obviously a completely different kind of identification with the distant others than that enacted by Hofmannsthal. It does not use these others for the aggrandizing or worlding of one’s self, but

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rather for its dissolution or exemption from the world. However, inasmuch as it is enforced by the Austrian self’s imperial worlding, it follows this self’s deactivation like an amorphous and indistinct shadow. The first technology of self-shaping brought Hofmannsthal the status of an author of world literature, the second excluded Crnjanski from this distinguished corpus. My parallel analyses of centrally and peripherally positioned writers in the traumatic constellation of post-imperial Europe follow these contrastive terms. In Chapter One “Ruling (out) the Province” I claim that, despite some recent nostalgic back-projections, discrimination of ‘barbarian’ borderlands was already constitutive of empires. After empires’ dissolutions, their successor states were ‘chosen’ by their glorious pasts to inherit supremacy over the new states whose populations were, for many centuries, relegated to the imperial ‘zones of indistinction’. Pressed into these godforsaken margins, and in this way weakened, their elites tried to enforce their self-confidence by looking for cross-border allies, which over time induced a division between their political affiliation and emotional attachment. The case I focus on is the Habsburg Serbs in Vojvodina who were officially affiliated to the Empire, but religiously, emotionally and culturally attached to their Southern compatriots (who were first under the Ottomans and then autonomous). However, the past that united them with their compatriots was not only too remote and strange but also irreparably lost through their long-term alienation. Brutally cut off from their identity ambition’s sources of satisfaction in both directions, they were left with practically no other choice but to nourish their sovereignty projects through a paradoxical deepening of their deprivation. The canonic writer of Yugoslav and Serbian literatures Miloš Crnjanski, a prominent member of their community, accordingly treats their utter self-dispossession in his early lyrics and narratives as the only proper source of national pride and a platform for liberation. Against the post-war triumphalism of the Serbian liberators from ‘imperial chains’, his work displays a passionate attachment to bare life as the only national property worth of saving. In this regard, I draw important parallels with the early work of the canonic writer of Yugoslav and Croatian literatures Miroslav Krleža. Both writers occasionally ironize the national martyrdom that directs all the violence against itself by redirecting it onto others. I analyze this constitutive bifurcation in their early works in terms of the disjunctive conjunction characteristic of the post-imperial Europe’s traumatic constellation. In Chapter Two “Disciplining the Wild(wo)men” I focus on two “translation zones” (Apter)—in both the geopolitical and historical senses of these words. The first pertains to the Ottoman frontier as epitomized in Borisav Stanković’s novel Impure Blood (Belgrade, 1910) and the second to the Austro-Hungarian frontier as epitomized in Janko Polić Kamov’s novel The Drained Swamp

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(Zagreb, 1909). The very titles of these novels indicate the common geopolitical perception of these in-between zones as “impure”—i.e. mixed, hybrid, contaminated—and “swampy”, i.e. indistinct, murky, amorphous areas, at least from the centers’ points of view. Unlike the titles, the years of the novels’ emergence announce the historical liminality of the time in question. In both novels, this peculiar combination of geopolitical in-betweens and historical states of exception—or the redoubling of the spatial by temporal shatterzones— enables individual technologies of self-exemption that are unimaginable in the culturally homogeneous and historically frozen peripheral communities of the time. In Stanković’s novel these revolutionary technologies are engaged by the figure of a designated bride and in Kamov’s novel by that of a self-designated artist. None of them are willing to succumb to the tacit ‘tomb rules’ of their milieus, whose taming of their ‘wild(wo)men’ turns out to have been even harsher than that applied by the (post-)imperial metropoles upon their ‘wild’ peripheries. Provincial violence seems to redouble and reinvigorate the central one. My thesis is that, while Stanković and Kamov uncovered how their ‘wild(wo)men’ exempt themselves from the ‘capillary‘ disciplinary measures of their peripheral social milieus, which were firmly determined to suppress their individualities, they in fact simultaneously exempted themselves from the restrictive rules of their own literary provinces. In Chapter Three “A Rebellion on the Knees” I deal with Miroslav Krleža’s interwar novellas, manifests, and essays. Due to his later resolutely Yugoslav and leftist orientation, his long-term interwar obsession with the ‘perennial’ national dispossession of the Croats has been rarely noticed. On the basis of a systematically mournful portrayal of both Croatia’s historical fate and its present condition—a tragic continuity of Croatian oppression—he raises a “masculine” imperative of a violent and final liberation from oppressors in both his fiction and essays. To legitimize this revolutionary utopia, he draws numerous analogies between the Croatian present, early nineteenth century, and the Middle Ages, i.e. epochs that had completely different political and ethnic statuses for ‘Croatianness’. This argumentative strategy not only reminds us of Crnjanski’s dealing with the Serbian question but also the way he contradicts it. Simultaneously, Krleža repeatedly cautions of the necessity of carefully establishing historical differences between these epochs. Besides, his argument persistently oscillates between the national and the social platform of collective liberation, employing a characteristically tacit transformation of class characteristics into national ones. He switches from one to the other in a passionate attachment to the radical ideal of self-determination, which with the Versailles Treaty was transposed from the well-established Western European nation states onto the fractured political space of East Central Europe, with

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devastating consequences. It ignited compensatory populist ideologies and dreams of sovereignty by presenting the new states’ pauperized and exhausted masses with the prospect of ultimate salvation from their precarious social and economic situation. Krleža proved a fanatical advocate of such starkly counterfactual projects. For him, as a writer from the East-Central European political and intellectual sphere, politics was a prophetic vision rather than a cold-blooded business driven by various pragmatic interests as in Western Europe. In Chapter Four “The Carnival’s Victims” I detect correspondences between Miloš Crnjanski’s poetic comedy The Mask and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s lyric comedy Arabella, which open up a cross-national and cross-cultural perspective beyond the restricted “methodological nationalism” (Ulrich Beck) of recent literary historiographies. By investigating them, I discover two writers who are “stranded in the present” (Fritzsche) of their nationally enflamed postimperial constellations. A common experience of non-belonging—although one of the central (Austrian) kind and other of the peripheral (Serbian) kind— gave rise to these writers’ shared tendency to establish an expanded community of victims beyond identifiable territorial and temporal terms. Both The Mask and Arabella systematically juxtapose two carnival frames: the jovial one that characterizes the subordinate horizon of characters and the melancholic one affiliated to the superordinate horizon of the author and his or her addressees. The characters enjoy the playful carnival atmosphere without heeding the threatening signs of the fatal carnival plot that, in front of the spectators’ very eyes, turns them into its blinded victims. In fact, it is precisely to avert their eyes from their victimhood in the extemporal sad carnival that they enthusiastically engage in the present jovial carnival. But in the view of Crnjanski and Hofmannsthal, it is not merely the enthusiastic protagonists of the short-term jovial carnival who are the victims of the long-term sad carnival, but so too are the authors of the jovial comedies. Detaching themselves from such lightminded comedy-writers, Crnjanski and Hofmannsthal reactivate the medieval idea of comedy in the sense affirmed by the Italian commedia dell’ arte. They project a sacrificial community that replaces the bodily ecstasy of self-affirmation with the spiritual ecstasy of self-denial through an act of self-exemption from the blinded carnival of life. I elaborate on the difference between their two self-exemptions at some length. In Chapter Five “Exempt from Belonging” I deal with two writers, Karl Kraus and Ivo Andrić, who, inheriting their multiple belongings from the imperial time, confronted the reinvigorated imperative to belong to one and only one nation in their new states, Austria and Yugoslavia. In addition to this, neither of these two post-imperial states were completely at home in the process of

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establishing nation-states and reducing national identity to one nation and one religion, as advocated by Western European states. Both had inherited the Western European modern idea of nation via the German imperial adjustment, which represented a compromise between the Western European modern and East-Central European pre-modern political heritage. Of course, by the time they become operating forces, i.e. about a century later, Austria and Yugoslavia were at least twice removed from their western models. It is their peculiar hovering in-between the empire and nation-state, which follows from this state of affairs, that set the stage for the meandering identity politics characteristic of both Kraus’s and Andrić’s work. By developing the self-exempting technologies of authoring their narratives, both Kraus and Andrić try to come to terms with their ‘internally exterior’ identities, with which the given historical and geopolitical circumstances unexpectedly confronted them. The breakdown of the Habsburg Empire raised Kraus’ consciousness of his suppressed Jewish difference in the same way as the dissolution of both the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires made Andrić aware of the in-betweenness of his ethnic, linguistic, and cultural affiliations. To exempt themselves from these political surroundings that had suddenly grown inimical, they shaped two divergent politics of authoring their selves. Kraus established his authorial self as the High Court of Justice who levels accusations against the humans in the name of sacrificed creatures. Andrić built up his authorial self as an impartial divine Judge who, in the name of eternal beauty, promises the presently antagonized human beings future reconciliation and harmony. In Chapter Six “The Dis/location of Solitude” I focus on Joseph Roth’s novel The Radetzky March (1932) and Radomir Konstantinović’s novel Descartes’ Death (Dekartova smrt, 1996) in terms of the patronizing relationship of the (post-)imperial central to peripheral constituencies. Although these constituencies, used to blame each other for the catastrophe after the breakdown of the political entity that had lodged them both for centuries, I argue that the construction of such enmity between them endeavors to suppress their deeper co-implication. Both an empire’s core and peripheries are divided into elites and populations, which reduplicates the relationship between them within them themselves. The novels that I analyze emerged in the aftermath of political catastrophes, i.e. the breakdowns of the Dual Monarchy and Yugoslavia, investigating their reflections on the private lives of families and also the reflections of the ruined family lives on the collapse of their respective states. The Dual Monarchy’s catastrophe introduces the post-imperial age to East Central Europe and the Yugoslav catastrophe the post-post-imperial age to East South Europe. In both novels the two axes of paternal protection—state-political and familial—reflect each other by simultaneously functioning as each other’s

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condition of impossibility. Both Roth and Konstantinović structure their novels in such a way so as to remind us that neither of these axes act in their own terms but rather with an unintended and sometimes even undesirable dependence upon each other. We must add to these paternal axes, however, the narrator’s attitude to the figures because it is, equally unwittingly, closely interrelated with them. Being as complex as Roth’s The Radetzky March and Konstantinović’s Descartes’ Death happen to be due to the indicated overlapping of various axes in their structure, these novels resist unilateral readings. I read them against their interpretations thus far, which have been predominantly entrapped within either the protector’s or the protégé’s point of view by blindly repeating the above sketched compulsive logic of mutual blaming. In Chapter Seven “The Politics of Remembering” I try to interlock two childhood recollections, Walter Benjamin’s Berlin Childhood around 1900 and Miroslav Krleža’s A Childhood in Agram 1902–1903. Both engaged childhood, in a wishful and retroactive projection, as a screen that absorbed the present shock, filtered the impact of the present trauma, and diminished its harm. In such a way, rather than offering a safe abode to the writers’ selves that had been hurt by the Nazi’s seizure of power, their remedial images of childhood conjured up their counterfactual pasts, alternate identities, and missed itineraries. Operating as an inexhaustible source of their longing rather than the firm place of their belonging, they did not abolish their unhomeliness but, on the contrary, unleashed its itinerancy. The child reconfigures the world of the adult by introducing apparently appeasing images into his disconcerted reflections. Instead of subversively enmeshing these extremes into the labyrinths of history like Benjamin, Krleža switches back and forth between them by searching for an exit from history, in the same way as he did, during the interwar period, between the national and social platform. In contrast to Benjamin who longs for the state of exemption’s zone of indeterminacy—analogous to the meandering role of the Jews among the European nations—Krleža persistently longs for the state of exception’s zone of determinacy, analogous to the South Slav longing for sovereignty. This explains why Benjamin, entrapped in a state of exception, conceives individuality in the weak messianic form as an enduringly subversive ferment at the heart of history, whereas Krleža conceives it in the strong messianic form as the carrier of a final liberation from history. He was an intellectual of the (post-)imperial borderland that is, by definition, situated in an enduring zone of indeterminacy. The hidden co-implication of the indeterminate state of exemption and determinate state of exception has made the gap between the imperial center and peripheries endure up to the present day.

Chapter 1

Ruling (Out) the Province and Its Consequences: Sovereignty, Dispossession, and Sacrificial Violence in the Early Work of Miloš Crnjanski and Miroslav Krleža

Translatio Imperii: The Divided Descendants

At the time of decolonization and the rise in Holocaust awareness, the numerous atrocities committed by Western European nation-states, both outside and inside of Europe, compromised them in the eyes of their leading intellectuals. Several decades later, the nation-states’ growingly bad reputations resulted in a peculiar nostalgia for the “potentiality of the multitude” (Hardt and Negri 82) of replaced empires. This nostalgia’s chief engineers, the post-Marxist philosophers Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, directed their critique primarily at Hegel’s advocacy of the nation-state. Retroactively opposing it, they interpreted the establishment of the nation-state as the subjugation of an empire’s multifarious and abundant possibilities (84). Yet their celebration of empires’ unbounded freedoms neglects, above all other things, the process of translatio imperii, which draws empires into competition over their forebear’s legacy. In the transmission of this legacy, which constitutes the core of translatio, successors claim the exclusive right of continuity against ‘illegitimate usurpers’. For example, all three of the ancient Roman Empire’s successors, namely the Islamic, Byzantine and Carolingian Empires, laid claim to being the sole proper heir to Roman sovereignty.1 Consequently, translatio presents itself as the sovereignty-legitimizing operation by a group of self-appointed representatives which is directed against their external and/or internal rivals, i.e. other empires and/or the given empire’s subordinate constituencies. The representatives of translatio use it to 1  In a sense, an empire’s ‘barbarians’ sooner or later become another empire’s carriers. This means that empires do not precede the division between the core and the periphery but follow on from it; the power relationship inheres to them as their constitutive feature (Motyl 21–24). A political unit free of divisions is always a compensatory back-projection. For the ‘barbarians’ drawn into the process of translatio imperii after the dissolution of Roman Empire, see Ausenda 1995.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi ��.��63/9789004358959_003

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blame these other pretenders for their disloyalty to what is supposedly the forebears’ genuine will. A case in point is the Serbian modern historiography’s notorious portraying of Orthodox Christianity as the only proper heir to Byzantium and the rejection of Ottoman Islam as its oppression and destruction, even though the Orthodox Church clearly “benefited from the imperial dimension of the [Ottoman] state, and its ecumenical character and policies are comprehensible only in an Ottoman framework. It is symptomatic that the secession of the emerging nations meant also an almost simultaneous secession from the Constantinople patriarchate, that is, from the Orthodox church of the Ottoman empire.” (Todorova 164) Even if they broke with the Byzanthine legacy, the Ottomans seem to have done so to a lesser degree than the Serbs when they broke from the Ottomans. In a word, Christianity and Islam are not necessarily opposites. Constitutive of empires no less than for nation-states, such external and/or internal discrimination explains why their claim to sovereignty is, from the very outset, controversial. However, if a controversial ambition for sovereignty is inherent in empires then these can hardly figure as the epitome of unconstrained multitude. The grasp of one representative group’s sovereignty at the expense of others dismantles it as a prefiguration for the nation-state. Multitude is placed at the service of an agency that operates as its secret but efficient manager in both an empire and this state. This discrimination constitutive of empires has not escaped the attention of prominent political philosophers dealing with imperial legacy. Consider Hannah Arendt’s interpretation of Roman cosmopolitanism for example. The foreigner in the Roman empire, she says, was included among the contractual allies not “out of mercy but for the sake of the expansion of the polis which, from now on, was expected to affiliate even the most foreign members to the new alliance of comrades” (Was ist Politik 114–115).2 They were welcomed as long as they accepted subordination to Roman law. Roman politics, engendered on foreign soil, “came into being precisely at the point where for the Greeks it reached its limit and end, in the in-between; that is to say, not between citizens, but between peoples, foreign and unequally opposed to each other and brought together only by conflict as they are” (108). Yet such a considerable recalibration of a human community that, by this point, geopolitically extended substantially further than the Greek polis did not entail its liberation. As the recent specialist in the field Greg Wolf has put it, we may conceptualize this operation as the expansion of Roman society through the recruitment of a colonized population to various underprivileged roles and positions in the social order (105). The civilizing process of ‘Romanization’ entailed a recognition that 2  All translations are by the author unless otherwise stated.

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not all races and regions were equally capable of the envisaged cultivation. Ultimately, the Romans privileged the South over the North, the West over the East, the littoral over the continent and cities over the countryside. In the regions where Roman assimilation succeeded, its end effect “might be compared to the demolition of street upon street of old houses, materials from which were used to create a tower-block to house the former inhabitants in a new style” (Wolf 47). Of course, with the Greek polis’s Romanization, translatio imperii all but reached its conclusion. Under the guise of reconciliation, it kept on deepening the asymmetries of the global political space. The civilizing global design of the Enlightenment, for instance, replaced the religious global design of the Renaissance. Yet, however secular Enlightenment rationalism was, it shared structural similarities with the “dogmatic” religion which it sought to displace (Connolly). The universal Christian mission of early European modernity was underpinned by the colonialist exploitation of the Americas in much the same way as its secular civilizing follow-up rested on the ongoing British, Dutch, and French imperialist plunder of Asia and Africa (Mignolo 722, 725–726). This may explain why modern cosmopolitanism rehearses the colonial difference between European and non-European peoples. Far from eliminating this fundamental imparity, its founder, Immanuel Kant, gradually complemented it and refined it with the geopolitical difference between the North, South and East European nations. In the section of Kant’s Anthropology entitled The Character of Nations, we read that England and France “are the two most civilized nations on the earth” (Anthropology 226). The German, however, “has a fortunate combination of feeling, both in that of the sublime and in that of the beautiful; and in the first he does not equal an Englishman, nor in the second a Frenchman, yet he surpasses both in so far as he unites them” (“On National Characteristics” 53–54). Herder deserves special attention in the context of translatio imperii because he was the designer of new identity politics in both the non-European and East-Central European imperial regions. At the outset of the third collection of his early Fragments on the New German Literature (1766/7), he describes the “colossus” of European literature as consisting of an Oriental head, a Greek breast, a Roman belly, Nordic-Gallic legs and German feet (Frühe Schriften 374). Paying tribute to all European nations, he reserves the earthly fundament and the only dynamic part of this colossal European body for the Germans who are now expected to move the magnificent European whole forward. Nonetheless, since ancestors with their complex mindsets are inscribed in the memory of their descendants, without sensitively and meticulously researching this rich genetic archive, descendants cannot realize who they really are. That is to say, the Germans cannot properly identify themselves without developing

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the Einfühlungsvermögen for the deceased foreign cultures, i.e. ability to enter into their mindsets. Their retroactive operation of self-finding acquires the pattern of an ongoing specification of the self through subtle differentiation from its otherness-to-itself. According to this pattern, the truth of the self is to be judged in terms of its future potentiality, while the truth of others is to be judged in terms of a past perfect being. All people belong to humanity but they do not occupy the same tense. To engage Elisabeth Povinelli’s vocabulary, the future-oriented autological subject and the past-addicted genealogical communities part ways with Herder (41–42). The subject pushes forward taking responsibility for the course of history and shaping his biography as a work of life-art, whereas communities, relegated to their restricted site in life, appear to be in need of constant assistance, protection and custody. Frozen in their exotic particularity, considered to be infantile and immature, unable to change themselves and develop their capacities, they serve as the backdrop of the Western self’s untiring disentanglement. “[T]heir inclusion within the realm of the human is precisely the source of their exclusion” (Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory 57–58). Unexpectedly, however, the envisaged self-propelling of the German Volksgeist turns out not only to be in need of these indistinctive ‘negative foils,’ but also to be constitutively dependent upon them. To recall Roberto Esposito: “Only if there are men (and women) who are not completely, or not at all, considered persons, can others be or become such.” (209) The ‘person’ must leave behind these ‘non-personal’ groupings to confirm the progress of its distinction, yet these groupings, instead of being surpassed, obstinately resurge within the ‘person’s’ very body in the form of so-called ‘foreign bodies’ or ‘internal pockets of exteriority.’ As it turns out that human “spirit contains at its very heart the wound of the non-spirit” (Remnants of Auschwitz 77), this irritation induces persistent blaming, stigmatizing and sanctioning of “non-persons” rather than their envisaged affirmation and regeneration. On the one hand, for sure, Herder’s generous thesis that “[t]he barbarian subjects, the educated overcomer cultivates” (Ideen zur Philosophie 706), brought him the avatar of the new, protective type of colonial administration that replaced the old, assimilating type. On the other hand, however, he did not consider all subjects to be able to educate themselves; those whom nature “was obliged to deny nobler gifts” she has taken care to compensate for this denial by “an ampler measure of sensual enjoyment” (“Organization” 77). As opposed to the people of “finer intellect,” their “breast swells with boiling passion” (77). Herder, for instance counts the Arabs, who unfold their “original character” in a neat communion with their horses and camels, among those resilient to cultivation (Ideen zur Philosophie 257). The “Negro” whom nature has placed “close to apes” is not

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much better, but parasitic peoples, such as Jews or “Gypsies”, provoke the real outbursts of his anger (702). Jews hang onto “almost all European nations,” drawing more or less profit from their juice.” (702) “Gypsies” are a people that is “by its birth far removed from everything that is called divine, decent and civilized” (703). I am not only claiming that this generous advocate for humankind’s ethnic diversity did not hesitate to denigrate and stigmatize its various branches but also that discrimination was a genuine constituent of his cosmopolitan project tout court. Herder involuntarily anticipated “one fine day” when, as Arendt memorably put it, “humanity will conclude democratically—namely by majority decision—that for humanity as a whole it would be better to liquidate certain parts thereof” (Origins of Totalitarianism 299). While the Slavs celebrated him as the father of their national revivals, he attributed to these “itinerant, auxiliary or serving peoples” (Ideen zur Philosophie 696) the “most cunning, terrible slavish inertia” (698). “Despite their incidental deeds, they never were as undertaking, belligerent and adventurous a people as the Germans; they rather tacitly followed behind them, occupying the emptied places and lands” (696). Nonetheless, Slavic nations’ intellectual elites embraced this humiliating attitude that lowered them to an object of grooming with the same enthusiasm as the elites in African colonies who embraced the shift in colonial rule toward the enforcing of ‘native’ traditions. Around the mid-nineteenth century, both perceived this “generosity” of their imperial centers to be the affirmation of their genuine substance by misapprehending what it had really been. Since it rested on “two propositions: one, that every colonized group has an original and pure tradition […]; and two, that every colonized group must be made to return to that original condition,” Mahmood Mamdani appropriately designated it as “the first political fundamentalism of the modern period” (Define and Rule 50). Several decades later, this shift in the West European administration of African and Asian colonies also entailed a restructuring of identity politics in East-Central European Habsburg and Ottoman empires that, in the same way as their colonialist counterparts, tried to rescue them from the approaching catastrophe. This new identity politics introduced the category of the foreigner in the place of the former category of the settler, which was more suitable to the imperial conception of nationhood since it was usually rendered in administrative rather than ethnolinguistic terms.3 This reorientation of modern 3  For the changing paradigm of nationhood through the history of Habsburg Empire, see Judson, The Habsburg Empire 48. As an example of the transition to a linguistic notion of the nation, with the conscription law of 1868, Austrian conscripts gained the right to be

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empires deserves attention because, as is known, the French Revolution politically introduced the foreigner as the French nation-state’s scapegoat (Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism 299–300).4 One of the after-effects of such reorientation toward the “indigenization” was, for example, Stalin’s politics of the Soviet nations’ rooting (korenizatsiia) and the Soviet minorities’ depraving (lishentsy), which “reinforced the belief of national majorities that minorities did not belong and should be expelled” (Martin 44). It was designed, if only unconsciously, on the Habsburg model.5 Viewed retroactively, this concession by the East-Central European empires to national identity politics spawned enormous consequences, paving the way for forthcoming ethnic wars in these regions which are characterized by extremely hybrid ethnic, religious, linguistic and cultural populations.

The Divided Identity: “One Man’s Meal, Another Man’s Poison”

In fact, Herder’s reconfiguration of the German imperial identity politics of his time already aimed to outmaneuver the foreign cultural strata in the German trained in their own language but Austrian officers, prevented as they were from serving in their own regions and frequently posted to new locations, were unable to learn so many local languages. The local population treated them as foreigners on the basis of this linguistic inability. 4  For the overlapping between the French republican model of national citizenship and that of Joseph II, see Judson, The Habsburg Empire 77. However, by putting emphasis on the integrational force of the Habsburg resp. Austrian Empire, Judson tends to underplay the explosive, disintegrational potential that inhered to these integrational efforts from the outset. To take an illustration from the French model, verse three of the Marseillaise (Quoi des cohortes étrangères, Feraient la loi dans nos foyers) expresses the fear that “hordes of foreigners” would come and dictate the law in the French “homeland”. Although oriented toward assimilation, the French Empire excluded its colonies’ populations from the main benefits of French citizenship. They were regarded as ‘foreign races’ and clearly distinguished from the French race. The same applies to the Habsburg ‘family model’ in which not all family members were equally welcome. For the asymmetry between the core and its peripheries as the defining characteristics of empires, see Motyl and Barkey. 5  The Habsburg Empire supported (rather than opposed, as is usually assumed) the emergence of nations, with the aim of governing them more efficiently (Judson, The Habsburg Empire 9). By following this model, Soviet and Yugoslav socialist internationalism did not erase the boundaries between nations but preserve them. In order to prevent the separatist claims of their constituencies, both were established as federations of equal nations. See Brubaker, Nationalism 23–54 and Hondius 122, 140, 145–146. For the parallels between the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, see Vujačić.

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national formation. In order to understand his systematic disentanglement of identity politics oriented toward national particularity, one has to bear in mind that Germany was from 1648 onwards not only biconfessional but also, for many centuries, a frontier state between Germans and Slavs (Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood 5–6). Whereas the Germans of Herder’s time were, along with various Slav nations, politically affiliated to their empire by a ‘decision from above,’ he now invented an indigenous ethnolinguistic affinity between the German past and its present along a temporal axis, and between domestic and dislocated co-nationals along a spatial axis. The idea was to separate the Germans from their non-national co-fellows by establishing the German nation as an imagined community of shared memory, solidarity and belonging, epitomized in the concept of ‘national spirit.’ Herder expected the Germans to shape this community of fate ‘from below’ by re-discovering their past, always anew, from their present. After the collapse of the Habsburg Empire, Hofmannsthal resumed his idea of Germany as a nation on a relentless search for its spirit by raising the Austrians to the status of its most appropriate carriers (“Reden und Aufsätze I” 457). As the representative of the imperial nation “naturally entrusted” with the cultivation of the Slavs (456), Hofmannsthal profiled Herder’s idea as the claim to supremacy not only over the small nations but also the big ones (“Das Schrifttum” 32). While these nations’ well-established spirits remain self-content, the German spirit capitalizes its openness to rejuvenation. Stating that the Austrians represent for Germans the same that the Slavs represent for Austrians and that America represents for Europe, i.e. an “immeasurable quantity of the young and unused (impulses)” to be invested for “higher purposes” of German and European selfpropelling (“Reden und Aufsätze I” 394), Hofmannsthal unwittingly uncovers this project’s exploitative design. Taking up Herder’s legacy, in the manner typical of trauma narratives, he turns the burden of German dividedness into an enormous advantage. Wounded as they were after the breakdown of their empires, it was not only Germans who were incredibly attracted to this re-uniting prospect but also the representatives of all East-Central European nations. After their empires collapsed, leaving their identities unsheltered, they embraced this “fateful” model even more enthusiastically. The ideologies of sustained, collective sacrifice for a common national future in the name of an allegedly common past find their most fertile soil and evoke a most genuine commitment in traumatic political constellations, in which social uncertainty becomes so pervasive that ordinary actors are unable to stick to any consistent political strategy for an extended period of time (Hanson). However fantasized it may be, the force of such affective attachment promises a large-scale historical existence, which might

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explain the recourse of numerous national liberation movements to it, from German Romanticists to those of post-imperial East-Central Europe. Yet there is an important difference between these two as regards the transition from empire to the nation-state. Germany was the successor to a longlasting empire and, in this sense, was ‘chosen’ by its past to inherit supremacy over the others. By contrast, the populations of the post-imperial nation-states were, for many centuries, relegated to the imperial “zones of indeterminacy” (Povinelli 3–4) in which, continually serving as the amorphous supplier rather than the articulate designer of imperial commonality, nothing distinctive could emerge. Pressed into these godforsaken margins, their elites were forced to become other-oriented rather than self-centered, which over time induced the so-called double consciousness defined by Du Bois as “the sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of the others” (Du Bois 8). Du Bois points to the antagonism genuine to the Afro-American “mongrel selves,” continuously torn apart between their national and racial identity. The same dividedness between the affiliation and affinity holds, for instance, for the Bosnian Muslims during Ottoman and Habsburg rule. Even though territorially and administratively affiliated with the Bosnian Orthodox and Catholic communities, they attached themselves both emotionally and culturally to Istanbul, from where they had expected their ultimate confirmation. Because of this enduring co-articulation with an ‘elsewhere,’ their ‘original and pure’ tradition from the pre-Ottoman time fell into complete oblivion. In sharp contrast to the successor states that claimed a richly resonating imperial legacy, in the case of provincial peoples, establishing a connection with their long abandoned ‘indigenous past’ amounted to an illusory task. It was not only too remote and strange to belong to their collective memory but, in addition to that, their longterm marginalization and pauperization disqualified them from such a gratifying succession. This ‘mission impossible’ of the so-called Bosniaks to perceive themselves within the identity frame that the new imperial center encouraged them to adopt, generated a persistent grief instead of the envisaged relief. The underprivileged social strata in particular had the bitter feeling of being forced into a fake sovereignty, forged by the new Western mentors who had the aim of better exploiting them. An ever-deeper dissatisfaction with the allocated road to ‘sovereignty’ became fertile soil for compensatory narratives of dispossession, simultaneously directed against the foreign masters and domestic traitors who benefited from collaborating with the foreigners.6 Brutally cut off 6  For example, the main protagonist in the Bosnian Serb writer Petar Kočić’s satirical play The Badger in Court ( Jazavac pred sudom, 1903), the peasant David Štrbac, does not ironize only the Austrians but also the requests for more autonomy by the Serbian Action for Orthodox

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from their identity ambition’s sources of satisfaction, these strata were left with practically no other choice but to nourish their sovereignty projects through a paradoxical deepening of their deprivation. This kind of self-exemption from the envisaged recognition frame, however painful in its consequences, was the only available response to the cynical imperial policy.

Crnjanski and the Dispossessed Vojvodina Serbs

In delineated circumstances, the sacrificial inclination of the Habsburg Serbs in Vojvodina at the beginning of the twentieth century deserves a closer inspection. Religiously, emotionally and culturally attached both to their Southern compatriots (first under the Ottomans and then autonomous) and the Russian empire for two centuries,7 the Habsburg Serbs in Vojvodina felt deeply frustrated in the Empire which they were affiliated to. Nonetheless, they refused ‘indigenization’ as the method of national identification, proposing in place of the imposed cultural self-possession the political self-dispossession as the platform for their liberation-through-violence.8 In his Lyrics of Ithaca (1919), Miloš Crnjanski, a prominent member of their community, treats the systematic bereaving of his compatriots of all identity marks, which ultimately left them nothing but bare life,9 as the only proper source of national pride. The Ecclesiastical-Educational Autonomy, because for him this meant collaborating with foreign rulers instead of overthrowing them (186). In his view, not only foreigners are oppressors but also compatriots who embrace their idea of national sovereignty. 7  Migrations of the Serbian population from Vojvodina to Russia, induced by their frustration within the Habsburg Empire, are planned by Vuk Isakovič, the main protagonist of Miloš Crnjanski’s Migrations 1 (Seobe 1, 1928) and materialized by Pavel Isakovič, the main protagonist of his Migrations 2 (Seobe 2, 1955). 8  This sacrificial politics that insists on the national dispossession of its carriers obviously draws on the contemporaneous proletarian “wretched on the earth,” which in its turn revivifies the much older pattern of Christian victimhood (for the upgrading of religious by socialist and then nationalist sacrificial patterns, see Mylonas 7–8). Such amalgamation of the victimhood’s heterogeneous forms as the mobilizing platforms of resistance-throughviolence was genuine to the East-Central European post-imperial space in which consecutive strikes, upheavals and revolutions induced a permanent state of exception (Berend 201). The former imperial provinces’ typical condition of indeterminacy was thus unleashed from its previously isolated zones. 9  The poem “Hymn” (“Himna”), for example, declares: “We have got nothing. Neither God nor master./ Our God is Blood.” And: “We had got neither home nor mother,/ We moved our blood.” (Nemamo ničeg. Ni Boga ni gospodara./ Naš Bog je Krv.—Ni majke ni doma ne imadosmo, /selismo našu krv.) (Lirika Itake 15). It is this utter deprivation of all material and

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long history of imperial frauds and deceptions10 engendered slavish humiliation of his people, which is why early death became a kind of mission for the contemporary Serbian youth. They put at stake the only property that they have: bare life. In the poems “Dithyramb” (“Ditiramb”), “Ode to the Gallows” (“Oda vešalima”) and “A Toast” (“Zdravica”), the poet interprets heroic sacrifice as the single source of national joy. As long as the slaves remain humble, they do not deserve honor. No matter the price, they must hate and despise their tyrants.11 “Long live the hate, death and scorn (Da živi mržnja smrt prezrenje),” reads Crnjanski’s “Our Elegy”, “the scornful laughter of the slaves elevates us into the heaven (U nebo diže nas/ prezriv osmeh roblja)” (Lirika Itake 20–21). The poet resolutely rejects the jubilant South Slav nationalism after the liberation, which uncritically evokes the time of medieval glory, because it forgets the crimes and immorality of this allegedly glorious aristocratic past.12 The poem “To the Memory of Princip” (“Spomen Principu”) declares that symbolic properties that, according to Agamben’s analyses in Homo Sacer, disaggregates human subjects to the condition of bare life. Agamben’s concept, via Arendt, goes back to the bloßes Leben from Benjamin’s essay Critique of Violence (“Zur Kritik der Gewalt” 202) that, via Derrida’s discussion in The Force of Law (“The Force of Law”), inspires Agamben’s State of Exception (37). Authorized by bare life, Benjamin advocates the engagement of divine “pure violence” against the oppression of “state violence” in fact in the same postwar time (1920–21) that motivates Crnjanski and Krleža to take into protection the dispossessed. His messianic argument, itself developed in the dangerous “zone of indeterminacy” between revolutionary liberation and violent annihilation, unwittingly testifies to a fascination with the “final solution” (LaCapra, “Gewalt” 160) that haunts both Crnjanski’s and Krleža’s interwar works. The general state of indeterminacy after the breakdown of empires shut the door wide for this fascination. 10  The poem “Grotesque” (“Groteska”) addresses the “thousand time” repeated fake “seals of the constitution and rights, / laws and statutes” (pečate ustava i prava, / zakona i štatuta) (Lirika Itake 18–19). 11  See the poem “To the Slaves” (Robovima), published 1918, but astonishingly not included in The Lyrics of Ithaca. It declares: “The glory will come/ When you will be led by killers” (Slava će doći/ kad vas povedu ubice) (Lirika Itake 105). 12  This opinion is not only put forth in The Lyrics of Ithaca. Three stories from the collection Stories about Manly Affairs (Priče o muškom), namely “The Apotheosis” (“Apoteoza”), “The Great Day” (“Veliki dan”) and “Paradise” (“Raj”) ironize the Serbian officers’ postwar glorification, portraying them as immoral and grotesque figures (Priče o muškom 28–34, 35–52, 116–132). They ignore the tortured soldiers, it is suggested, in the same way that the corrupt medieval noblemen disregarded the suffering peasants. However, Crnjanski’s narrator also mocked the Serbian “Thessaloniki” officers’ cockiness, among other reasons, because the Yugoslav army rejected his application for the officer position after the war. As he lived in Vojvodina, he was an Austro-Hungarian conscript in the war and they were despised by both the “Thessaloniki” heroes and the new Yugoslav officers.

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celebrating this golden age amounts to a lie because it neglects the terrible suffering of peasants during that time and thereafter: “My people are not the fluttering emperor’s flag/ But a dishonored mother./ Sweat and poverty and hate/ smoldering in the shame of ashes and rocks” (Moj narod nije carski steg što se vije, / nego majka obeščašćena … Znoj i sirotinja i mržnja što tinja/ u stidu zgarišta i stena) (25). In the “Soldier’s Poem” (“Vojnička pesma”), the soldier uncovers the adored national temples as the sites of slavery (27–28). The same goes for other South Slav peoples, invited by the poet to proudly confront their relegation to a condition of indistinction as their true destiny. The poem “To Yugoslavia” (“Jugoslaviji”) accordingly reads: “No glass you drink/ no fluttering tricolor/ is ours.” “We are true brothers / in shame, penance, and poverty” (Nijedna čaša što se pije/ nijedna trobojka što se vije/ naša nije … U sramu pokoru bedi/ braća smo, braća) (31–32). The young poet sees history from below, putting the perspective of the deprived at the forefront. As opposed to the foreign and domestic oppressors who are attached to possession, they are passionately attached to dispossession, or bare life, as the only remaining belonging that obliges to abstinence rather than boasting. The poet accordingly abhors the celebration of the medieval imperial courts “full of Byzantine lust” (Ješić 65).13 If there are national heroes, then they are not among the feudal nobility but rather the suffering peasantry. Opposing the canonic poetry of Jovan Dučić and Milan Rakić that glorifies distant kings and noblemen in its polished and elegant verses, the morally upset poetry of the young Crnjanski takes the side of a “miserable bloody soldier who dies in the mud among the carcasses of horses” (64),14 a figure clearly reminiscent of the tragedy that befell the Serbian army in the First World War. The poet seems to be spontaneously projecting this victimized modern soldier onto the Serbian medieval peasant, establishing in this way a ‘community of fate’ on the continuous experience of dispossession. Based on the solidarity among the silenced victims, his Schicksalsgemeinschaft substantially differs from the German successors’ one that perceived itself as being authorized by the law of history. Forging his community in clear opposition to the victors’ triumphalism, young Crnjanski affirms the “silent and modest suffering of those who died on the pale” (65).15 After the First World War, showing respect 13  This quotation is from the review article “Ivo Andrić”, Jedinstvo (28 June 1919). 14  This quotation is from Crnjanski’s review of a minor Serbian contemporary poet Milan Đurčić, which was published in Književni jug 11–12/1919. 15  Dying on the pale refers to an Ottoman mean of punishment, which means that the poet associates the Serbian soldiers’ suffering in the First World War with the Serbian peasants’ suffering under the Ottomans. In the poem “Grotesque” he also melts the

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to the innumerous dead was a matter of elementary responsibility. Crnjanski’s post-war poetry emerges out of shame for those who lack it.16 However, although he is against the aggrandizing of medieval dynasties, his conception of suffering is anything but “silent and modest.” It not only justifies the vengeful execution of tyrants but invites the sufferers to undertake it. According to the poem “Dithyramb” (“Ditiramb”), liberation from slavery has no alternative even if it implies the most terrible sacrifice of one’s own children and the terrifying of one’s own mother (Lirika Itake 26). Only a merciless dethroning of oppressors warrants such fame.17 In the poem “To the Memory of Princip,” the young poet’s revolutionary fervor raises Gavrilo Princip’s assassination of Franz Ferdinand to the status of a heroic deed. By spontaneously following his great poetic predecessors Petar Petrović Njegoš18 and Đura Jakšić,19 who summoned their compatriots to sacrifice their lives for their people, he Austro-Hungarian cheating “promises” into the Ottoman deceitful “statutes” ( fermani). Such application of the Serbian national identity onto the centuries that could not know it surreptitiously endorses the continuity of Serbian martyrdom. At the same time, Crnjanski explicitly claims that “our nationality begins with Karađorđe /i.e. Serbian uprisings against the Ottomans in the first decades of the nineteenth century/, everything else is a false tradition” (Ješić 65). Such self-contradiction did not belong only to Crnjanski but rather the post-imperial writers’ repertory in general. (In Chapter Three we will see how Krleža demonstrates it as well.) Even if, from the mid-1920s, Crnjanski started to embrace the narrative of Serbian martyrdom with ever less hesitation, he did not abandon its questioning. Like Krleža’s or Hoffmansthal’s and Kraus’s subject, his was also haunted by a persistent self-negation. Beyond the Viennese authors, a number of Crnjanski’s contemporaries also practiced the duplication and splitting of their egos into a variety of contradicting alter egos. This interminably contrapuntal technique is, after all, part of a European tradition of ‘Socratic dialogue’, widely attested and thoroughly examined by Mikhail Bakhtin in his book Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. 16  See his review referred to in the footnote 14 in which he asks whether “in poetry there is no responsibility and the feeling of shame” (Ješić 64). The narrator in The Diary about Čarnojević, himself a returnee from the war, asks “Should I start celebrating with the bastards and villains who will forget everything, dancing on the ashes”? (Dnevnik o Čarnojeviću 75). 17  The poem “Dithyramb” declares: “The honorable banner of rebellions and killers./ My people, you are their elect.” (Steg dičan buna i ubica./ O rode ti si izabranik njin.) (Lirika Itake 26). 18  Recall the verses from The Mountain Wreath (Gorski vijenac): “Young grains bow your heads, your harvest has arrived before its time!” (“Mlado žito navijaj klasove,/ pređe roka došla ti je žnjetva!”). 19  Recall the verses from Fall, brothers (Padajte braćo): “Throw your children into the fire,/ throw away your slavery and shame!” (“Bacajte sami u oganj decu,/ stres‘te sa sebe ropstvo i sram!”).

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unreservedly endorses heroic victimhood. After all, what else remains to those who are deprived of all rights and dignity? “Ode to the Gallows” is an exemplary celebration of sacrificial violence, a cynical response to the Dual Monarchy’s notorious technique of executing the provincial deserters and ‘traitors’ during the First World War.20 The poem depicts the gallows as the only salvation left after Jesus forgot his subordinates for long centuries, the only chance for them to reach the heaven. Since they prefer honorable death over miserable survival, they trust the gallows will embrace them firmer than any bride.21

20  Toward the end of Joseph Roth’s The Radetzky March, where the First World War’s outbreak is described, its hero Carl Joseph Trotta confronts the dangled “traitors” everywhere in Ukraine (347–49). This topic is also addressed by Karl Kraus in The Last Days of Humankind, in which Moaner, describing a hanged Ukrainian women, states that “Austria’s highest majesty is the gallows” and that “la corde savonée is an Austrian specialty, its most famous export article” (505, 508, 511). In Crnjanski’s novel Seobe 1, that describes the Habsburg Serbs’ warpath from 1744, it is said that the Austrians “started to hang soldiers caught at thieving just a single head of cabbage in the field” (140, see also 149–50, 159–62, 204). However, both the narrator and various figures in this novel heartily embrace the Serbian victimhood narrative, as if reinstating Crnjanski’s youthful fascination with it. The scenes of cruel punishments against the Serbs by Austrians (flogging, 41–43, 202, 217, 223; walloping, 219) and Ottomans (impalement, 191; raping of women, stabbing of children, and quartering, 201) agglomerate. Nonetheless Crnjanski did not stop mocking this narrative even thereafter, as we will see in short. Neither did he renounce reaffirming it, as in the commentary to “Ode to the Gallows”, where he speaks about “the alleys of gallows raised by Austria in Serbia,” the Austrian walloping of a young teacher and bestial treatment of “our people.” (Itaka i komentari 99) Crnjanski depicts dangling as usual means of disciplining in the Austrian army (64, 89, 95), but Austria “conducted a war” especially “against our people” by treating them “as beasts, as bedbugs” (99). As he himself repeatedly remarks, his patriotism was near to “madness” (99, 138). In this regard Vojvodina Serbs, because located beyond the geopolitical border of ‘proper’ Serbia (Prečani, “those from abroad”), were typically “more popish than the pope himself”. This does not mean, of course, that the treatment of soldiers and civilians by the Austrian army was humane. The Habsburg military law was “the most draconian in Europe” but “was not a special system for Serbia designed by a vengeful army. Harsh penalties all came neatly packaged in the Militärstrafgesetz and Standrecht (summary justice), old systems of legal coercion already in place in parts of the Empire during the war” (Gumz 105). The thesis of a vicious system of law designed specifically to terrorize Serbia, entrenched in Serb historiography, is also resolutely rejected by Kramer 144. 21  Testifying to the endurance of the national victimhood narrative in the Serbian population, the same self-sacrificial logics characterize this population’s famous response to the Nazi threat in the Second World War: “Better the grave than a slave!” (“Bolje grob nego rob!”). For the tradition of sacrificial salvation in the Serbian culture, see Mylonas 147–177.

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While someone from the ‘center’ can ask oneself “How can one be what one is?” and arrive at abstract philosophical conclusions, the same question for someone outside the ‘center’ is “likely to be less abstract and less serene,” as Matei Calinescu has aptly remarked. It more likely would evoke feelings of envy, insecurity, inferiority, “frustration or distress at the marginality or belatedness of his culture.” It can also trigger a mood of self-abuse; finally, it could provoke resentment that could, in some cases, be transmuted, by way of compensation, into a superiority complex. Todorova 57

The early work of Crnjanski epitomizes this transformation of the feeling of inferiority and frustration into a source of pride and even a superiority complex. As Lauren Berlant has shown in her book on “cruel optimism,” the passionate salting of one’s own wounds functions in a deprived population as an inexhaustible source of not only pleasure but also hope (Berlant). The more horrible the pain, the more determined the sufferer is to search for the ‘final solution’ to get rid of it forever. Compromises do not count. This seems to have been the guideline of the subordinates’ behavior not only in postimperial East Central Europe but also the U.S.-American postcolonial setting. According to Abdul JanMohamed, the death-bound Afro-American subjects who, from their birth onwards, lived under a constant menace of physical violence, responded to it equally violently without fearing the cruelest execution (JanMohamed).

Krleža and the Dispossessed Croatian Community

Crnjanski was by no means the only post-imperial South Slav writer to advocate sacrificial violence. His ideas corresponded in many ways to those of his prominent Croatian contemporary Miroslav Krleža who, in his turn, also associated national liberation with the utterly dispossessed lower social strata. In two portraits of the characters from the Glembay family’s circle, published in 1932, he twice returns to an analogy between the Upper Croatian early twentieth century’s peasant landscape and that of Brueghel’s early sixteenth century Brabant (Glembajevi. Proza 222; 299–300), which was for the first time drawn in an essay from 1925 (“Pismo iz Koprivnice”). How obsessed he was with the desolate condition of the Northern Croatian province, is testified by his fourth resumption of the same motive in his “Preface to Krsto Hegedušić’s ‘Motives from Podravina’ ”, in which he even does not hesitate to quote himself

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(“Predgovor” 219–220).22 In the portrait of the lawyer Klanfar, this analogy is extended through a comparison with the contemporary Brabant, which the lawyer recently traversed with his luxurious automobile in the same way as he now traverses Northern Croatia. This bright, beautiful, God blessed Dutch country, with its sewerage and asphalted roads, looked to him tonight in comparison with this mud and the hungry cows as a picture from paradise. There the stalls are tiled with blue-white porcelain, and here everything is tubercular and pale, and electric blubs are unknown to anyone. Glembajevi. Proza 300

Hungry and dreary villages with thatched roofs and bare hedges, with crucifixes and rattling carts dragging through the mud a sack of corn flour. Cows returning from the pasture, hungry and muddy; every now and then an animal jumped in front of the car, which rolled through the mud and gave the sad, monotonous signals […] On the hedges the blue and red rags were drying, and women scrubbed beds in the open doors. Yellow, plain beds of soft pine, with a red heart of Jesus. (299) Like his heroes who travel through this province either by a luxurious car or train (as does the second character, Križovec) (220–223), Krleža is sentimentally attached to this godforsaken and utterly dispossessed Croatian province. In the aforementioned Preface, he praises the painter Hegedušić for his insistence on its gallery of miserable, disgraced, humiliated, offended, abused, and deformed figures of beggars, prisoners, poachers, epileptics, and burglars. By unmasking the sick and grotesque background of the rural idyll Hegedušić acts against the Herderian pastoral of the “domestic” (“Predgovor” 223–225) in the same way that Krleža himself opposed the representatives of the so-called Illyrian National Revival (from the 1840s) and their contemporary followers for remaining confined to their artificial world without the slightest contact with their plundered country bathed in blood. Just as Crnjanski indirectly objected to Rakić and Dučić, Krleža argued, in the immediate aftermath of the October Revolution, that such weak-willed 22  At yet another place, Krleža compares the famous Dutch painting of the second half of the seventeenth century with life in Croatia at that time, “with an old-fashioned flint in the hand and on the horse”. At that time, according to testimonies, the Croatian soldiers had skinned Turkish heads and squeezed blood from the slit Turkish throats (“O patru dominikancu” 50–51).

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sorts are not up to the challenge of the revolutionary present. Polemicizing against such irresponsible petty bourgeois behavior, he advocated an enflamed revolutionary Croatianhood that, much like a fire, swallows up all artificial life forms, which are completely alien to the dispossessed Croatian people (“Hrvatska književna laž” 32). How close this fire in the literary manifesto “The Croatian Literary Lie” is to the sacrificial violence in Crnjanski’s The Lyrics of Ithaca can be explained through a comparison with the fire from the novella “The Croatian Rhapsody”. In it the Croatian Genius takes up the command over the locomotive, madly accelerates the train by directing it away from the rails in order to devastate the cathedrals, theaters, academies, palaces, parliaments, and luxurious Croatian lies. In its wild rage this sacrificial train leaves behind a wide trail of the flames and blood (“Hrvatska rapsodija” 417). Recall that Crnjanski’s “Hymn” repeats “Our God is Blood”, concluding “It is our terrible pride” (Lirika Itake 15). Krleža never stopped blaming and despising the Croatian “domestic” literature for its sentimentality, immaturity and unwillingness to cope with the revolutionary challenges of the historical present (Davni dani 1 150–15, 175, 182, 255–256, 301, 311–312, 314–315, 398, 408–410; Davni dani 2 50–51, 347–348). With Nietzsche, he advocated manly struggle as the fundamental principle of life. The germ of all confusions lies therein that life appears to be […] exclusively and only a merciless struggle, and that the individuals who are incapable of taking part in it because it hurts them, that such weaklings are doomed to disappear. […] They are dreamers. The talentless poets. Davni dani 2 30

I do not want to be ill. Who can overpower my steady will that did not want, and refuses even today, to succumb to this foolishness around me? (47) Such manhood implies a constant struggle with the femaleness inside oneself: “To lose one’s will is a wavering female behavior. Despair is a female trait …” (Davni dani 1 50). Men set themselves higher objectives in contrast to, for instance, a “dumb lady” who is “not aware” of “her hunger for love” (32), “a vulgar widow with cow’s eyes” (68), and the “stupid gaze of a goose” genuine to Boticelli’s Primavera, and since “all women are such Primaveras, the devil knows what is going through the minds of these Primaveras” (52). Krleža shows only scorn for women who try to play men (358; Davni dani 2 9), preferring those who are “virginally intact” (“Djetinjstvo 1902–03” (1977) 371) or provided with

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the “silky eyelashes” of “protecting angels” (Davni dani 1 209). Unlike females whose task is to offer men consolation from the madness of the surrounding world (52), Krleža obliges men to follow the imperatives of the will (his apotheosis of this concept pays tribute to his passionate reading of Schopenhauer): When the will, the powerful human will rears and when it ingeniously as a storm blows over reality, and when only the centauric thud of hooves can be heard as it soars as a cannonade or a bullet, and when this pure, wonderful will, spiritualized through poetic rapture abandons earth and frees itself from the ground ballast, takes off like a balloon and turns into a Work, oh, at such a moment it would be worth being born in humiliation and shame only to victoriously surmount them. (202) Here we have the same advocacy of the deepest dispossession as the precondition of a final violent liberation that we have registered in Crnjanski’s early work. Such a liberation cannot be accomplished through tactical politics but exclusively revolution. Responding to the utter despair of subordinates, revolutionaries resolutely reject pragmatic compromises. Man grows like a poplar: high, bold. Man-poplar bounced off the land, growing in the clouds, talking with thunder. Man-poplar will grow over that which is called: to be down on earth. (49) Because the proposed violent liberation requires victims, Krleža praises Croatian martyrs such as Matija Gubec, Juraj Križanić, and Frano Supilo in the same way as young Crnjanski identifies with the Serbian martyrs Gavrilo Princip and the “Dalmatian loiterer”, the narrator’s Doppelgänger (“more than a brother”), in The Diary about Čarnojević (Dnevnik o Čarnojeviću 45–57).23 He is presented as a thin, exhausted, and pale former navy officer with an adventurous father, much like the narrator’s own and an overtired mother, who reminds the narrator terribly of his own mother (49). Having nothing on Earth

23  Krleža’s gallery of martyrs is huge and reaches far beyond the Croatian borders. For example, it comprises Jesus Christ, St Augustine, Columbus, Michelangelo, Erasmus, Darwin, and Lenin. In strictly Croatian terms, it contains the Bosnian Bogomils, the language reformer Ljudevit Gaj, the bishop and benefactor Josip Juraj Strossmayer, the poets Silvije Strahimir Kranjčević, August Harambašić, and Antun Gustav Matoš, the novelist Ante Kovačić, the politician Stjepan Radić, and the painter Vjekoslav Karas (“Teze za jednu diskusiju” 496–97; “O Kranjčevićevoj lirici” 37).

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to adhere to, this fantast is feverishly in love with Heaven (as is the narrator)24 and books (he learned from my books, says the narrator) (51). For both postwar Krleža and Crnjanski, therefore, the only appropriate heroes were sufferers and the only appropriate foundational myths were those based on dispossession. For both, the road to freedom led through a victimhood directed at the ‘final solution’. Krleža’s martyrs were usually fantasts from the lower social strata who did not let political reality spoil their utopian projects. Their radicalism emerges in the same “small provincial culture’s neglected and forgotten peripheral existence” (“Stjepan Radić u Beogradu” 222) that drives this culture’s collaborating intellectuals to rush from one subordination into another. Bitterly disappointed by the Yugoslav Monarchy, which the representatives of the Croatian people chose so as to escape the harsh Hungarian rule, Krleža joins Crnjanski in arguing against the blindly triumphant Yugoslav elite.25 Even if this carrier group has changed its political masters, the argument goes, the economic and social condition of the lower social strata remained equally miserable. “Nobody wants to see these people with panniers, sleeping with a sack under their heads on Franz-Joseph-Platz like Tuaregs” (Davni dani 1 319). All nation-building movements forget about the poor people, refugees, skeletons, and immigrants (397). Krleža is convinced that only uncompromising martyrs recruited from these strata can really act on behalf of such “plebeian ragtags” (411). To legitimize such revolutionary action, he is at constant pains to invent the tradition of the extremely dispossessed. Following this thread and using uncritical retroactive projections like Crnjanski, he ultimately establishes the ‘true’ Croatian national identity on the sacrificial experience of ‘bare life’. 24  The narrator, it is said, is much more attached to Heaven than to women or people for that matter (42). The latter attachment would make him a modest particle of the material world whereas the former enables his ascension, dematerialization, aloofness, a “gentle smile” of indifference toward the ridiculous political struggle on Earth and thereby a “tremendous power over the affairs of the world” (54). However, in the perennial alternative of Serbian history between the earthly kingdom of Miloš Obilić and the heavenly kingdom of Emperor Lazar, his depicted inclination toward Lazar is provisional as he continually oscillates between the two. At another place in the novel, for instance, he openly glorifies murder (78). 25  Krleža ridicules this elite most exemplarily in “The Drunken November Night 1918” (Pijana novembarska noć 1918) written in 1942 and published for the first time 1952. He ironizes the former Austro-Hungarian officers among the Croats who, in post-war Zagreb, decided to celebrate the victorious Serbian officers as if they had not hanged them during the war. Whereas Crnjanski targeted the Serbian officers’ neglect of the fallen Serbian soldiers, Krleža criticizes the Croat officers’ adulation for their former enemies that hypocritically aimed at fostering their careers in the Yugoslav army.

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Charity Drive: Representing the Victims

Silently passing over its ‘engineering’ character, Crnjanski’s and Krleža’s passionate attachment to the selected martyrs presents itself as a natural continuation to these martyrs’ sacrifice for their community. In the First World War’s apocalyptic atmosphere, some representatives of the East-Central European elite found themselves haunted by a sense of guilt toward the lowest social strata, inducing their critical distancing from their noble social milieu.26 This spawned their charity drive that feverishly looked after its confirmation. Both Krleža and Crnjanski are such representatives yet, in accordance with their highlighted persistent self-negation, they contradict this charity drive at the same time, uncovering its selfish background. We read in Krleža’s A Childhood 1902–03 for instance: A man likes to cry, a man loves to suffer! A wellspring of compassion and mercy, which drains out of the human heart, is intermixed with the hellish, impure source of tragic, with the flow of the slimy, foul, repulsive lust in which a man thunders out of his heavenly clarity and glory! Djetinjstvo 1902–03 (1977) 420

Likewise, Križovec’s abovementioned compassion for the plundered Northern Croatian province is ironized as a “capricious, superficial, decorative mood” of this “young careerist, rider, gentleman, young man of ‘genuine’ blue blood” who “travels in a salon wagon”, “smokes the finest cigarettes, sips cognac, intimately happy that he is not destined to be a district official somewhere on this boring provincial line” (Glembajevi. Proza 223). His swift and comfortable traversing of the province in an express train’s luxurious wagon is anticipated in the poem “Twilight at a station of a small provincial town” from Krleža’s early lyrics (1919–1921) in which a “luxurious blue train” with glittery wagons full of tablecloths, silver, glasses of Rhine wine, whiskey and the finest dishes rumbles through the “rotting gray fences of the sad gray barracks”, where “everything is dark and becomes even darker” (Pan 128–129). Mobility and immobility are irreconcilable. The same is suggested in the closure of the poem “A night in province,” in which the destiny of the provincial people is compared to the destiny of dogs: 26  Repentance was in Crnjanski’s and Krleža’s case probably intensified as both were, for the most part, spared of war traumata. In fact, both attended Austro-Hungarian military schools aimed at the positions that ensured a comfortable detachment from the stellenloses Kanonfutter. For Crnjanski see Ješić 81, for Krleža see Lasić 128.

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A canine assembly, you’re barking, but the caravan go, and there is a rattle of harness, the creak of the wheels and hooves to be heard. In vain your barking pours all the canine hatred on the passersby. All pass and disappear, and you, on the chain, like a blind shadow, wait for fate to die with you here doggish under the fence.27 Pan 173

At stake is an unbridgeable gap, at least one can hardly bridge it up from a “lacquered and carved Austro-Daimler” with a speed of 75km per hour (Glembajevi. Proza 299). To underline this, the narrator attributes the aforementioned Klanfar’s sentimental compassion to his unhappiness because of the divorce from his wife that he went through (303–305). To turn now to Crnjanski’s literary ironizing of benefactors, his narrator in “The Lacrimal Crocodile” (1931) presents the figure of the prominent politician Mr. Nikolajević, this time not merely the paupers’ advocate but a patriot too.28 Like Crnjanski and Krleža themselves, Nikolajević places himself at the service of national martyrs. His wife cheats on him, his children betrayed his expectations, and he needs a passionate identification to compensate for these losses. He weeps over their hypertrophied destitution in order to disguise his incurable pity over his own crushed expectations, including his youthful “enthusiasm for humankind” (“Suzni krokodil” 125). Ultimately, his accumulated injuries drove him from the socialist idea of human unification toward a deep national resentment: According to him, it always darkened over the Serbs and, compared to other nations, only they deserved to have tears shed over them. Claiming that they are the most tortured people in the world, he put forth a twofold proof for this. The historical one, according to which this people had worse neighbors than the antediluvian monsters that paled it, cut it in the womb, roasted it alive, threw it as a food to the crows […] 27  O, pasji sabore, ti laješ, a karavane idu. I čuje se zveket orme, kopita i točkova škripa. Zaludu lavež tvoj svu pasju mržnju na prolaznike sipa. Svi prolaze i nestaju, a ti na lancu kao sjena slijepa, Sudbinu čekaš da s tobom tu pod plotom pasji krepa. 28  Although the narrator gives M. N. as his initials (112), the figure’s age of 50 years in 1927 (114), when his described electoral visit to Serbian peasants was taking place, as well as his status of being a “minister’s son”, indicates that he might have been shaped on the figure of Božidar Nikolajević (1877–1947), son of Obrenović’s minister and grounder of the Radical Party Svetomir Nikolajević.

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Thereupon the experiential proofs, which he presented in such a skillful manner, that they have shaken the listeners to the bottom of the soul. (123–24) In Nikolajević’s view, the only proper representatives of this terribly tormented Serbian people are peasants due to their “immeasurable unspoken suffering” and an “absolute resignation, one that exceeds human measure” (125).29 His meandering identification that modified the victims’ profile in the course of his life to make them compensate for his metamorphosing frustrations, nicely fits the above delineated patriotism on the part of Crnjanski and Krleža that ranged between social, economic, and national martyrdom. As a result of this association, the narrator’s irony toward the “lacrimal crocodile” becomes multidirectional. Were these prominent writers’ passionate identifications with their “permanently subjugated” peoples likewise a new form of their youthful socialist fantasies, even more remedial because it now had to also make up for these fantasies’ collapse? Whatever the case might be, the irony of Krleža’s and Crnjanski’s narrators toward their self-victimizing protagonists—or their own self-victimizing for that matter—indicates that the sovereignty’s carriers are wishful projections of non-sovereign agencies. As the East-Central European states’ sovereignty was inspired by the model and determined by the decision of Western European countries, it did not come into being by the free decision of its carriers. How can someone who looks at himself or herself through the eyes of the others, thus becoming the very epitome of the “double consciousness” (Du Bois), be sovereign at all? Sovereignty implies self-determination, while the established Western nation-states pressed the elites of their belated imitations into identification with their “national” past. Once these elites introduced this backward orientation as the official state politics, the social and economic misery of the lower strata was deepened. Unlike the democracy in the Western European nation-states, which developed through a continual negotiation between the elites and various social classes, in the post-imperial European states national elites ruled ‘from above’ without really considering the opinion of the lower social strata (Barkey and van Hagen 187). The latter’s rage was thus turned against these elites.

29  In Crnjanski’s original text, this sentence is in fact given in French (une résignation absolue, une résignation surhumaine) and Nikolajević repeatedly “decorates” his train conversation with the young escort with French sentences. This completes the ironic portrait of the Serbian politician whose passion for simple people repents his past and promotes his future.

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Deeply disappointed with such a perversion of the South Slav sovereignty project in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, Crnjanski and Krleža propose a reversal, i.e. the elite’s sacrifice for the lowest strata that is now regarded as the carrier of the people’s sovereignty. Yet if this ‘beneficial sacrifice’ is, ultimately, merely a self-promoting therapy, as our literary examples demonstrate, it severely perverts the sacrifice of the subordinates who invest all they possess, i.e. bare life. This is why Crnjanski’s and Krleža’s project of sacrificial violence cannot free the sovereignty that it accomplishes from the oppression’s reaffirmation. It only replaces the violence committed by the Western European countries upon the East-Central European countries with that committed by the social elite upon the dispossessed population. The population is now predisposed to look at itself through the eyes of the elite in the same way that the East-Central European elites were previously predisposed to perceive themselves through Western eyes. Inasmuch as both the elite and the population thus involuntarily work for the other, their sovereignty reenacts subordination.

The Failure of Sovereignty: The Bifurcation of Sacrificial Violence

The reemergence of the subordination at the heart of sovereignty explains why both Crnjanski and Krleža continuously reconfigured their sacrificial project. To come to terms with the reiterated frustration, they stubbornly redesigned sacrificial violence, repeatedly aiming at the achievement of sovereignty. Thus, in the Serbian tradition, next to the bellicose martyr Miloš Obilić who puts his life at stake to kill the sultan, there is also the heavenly martyr Emperor Lazar who rejects other-oriented violence. In the Croatian tradition, the visionary poet Silvije Strahimir Kranjčević acts as a counterpart to the conspirators against the Emperor, Petar Zrinski and Fran Krsto Frankopan. Hence, to achieve salvation for one’s community, one can avoid aggression against the other, exposing oneself instead to torture and/or death. However, the otheroriented and the self-oriented violence do not merely exclude each other but also imply each other. If Miloš killed the sultan by victimizing his own life, Lazar’s generous victim inflicts violence upon his descendants in the sublime form of their grief for his martyrdom. Responding to the iterative failure of their sovereignty projects, Krleža and Crnjanski thus redirect violence from the other(s) to the self and back to the other(s). Crnjanski, for example, introduces the feverish assassin Gavrilo Princip in The Lyrics of Ithaca (1919) and, in The Diary about Čarnojević (1921), the indifferent fantast Dalmatian loiterer; Krleža, for his part, presents the Croatian Genius as the merciless leader of a punitive expedition in “The

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Croatian Rhapsody” (1918) and in the essay “On the Dominican Father Juraj Križanić” (1929) the enthusiastic visionary who puts his life at risk to achieve the unity of all Slavs. This stubborn bifurcation of their sacrificial figures in two opposite groups uncovers their conflict-ridden selves who establish oppositions only to exempt themselves from them. Whoever establishes his or her identity on an opposition proves to be dependent on his or her opposite rather than being truly sovereign. The sovereignty to which these authors aspire resists such contrastive identification, attaching itself to the persistent selfnegation that Absent God acquires in negative theology. As Derrida remarked, “negative theology consists in regarding every predicate […] as inadequate to the essence […] of God”; “only a negative (“apophatic”) attribution can claim to approach God.” “God’s name would fit everything that cannot be broached, approached or designated, except in an indirect and negative way” (“How to Avoid Speaking” 146). An expert on Krleža’s work stated that “whoever engages in his work, engages in a work that incessantly negates itself” (Lasić 12). As if exteriorizing his internally conflicting opinions, Krleža untiringly inserts “imaginary dialogues” between the invented antagonists, not only into his novellas, but also his travelogues, diaries, novels, and essays (Žmegač 35–45). Another important form of a persistent self-negation, in Krleža’s work as well as that of the Austrian postimperial writers, is the grafting of one art or genre onto another, i.e. merging the most hybrid components into a contrapuntal unity, in the style of Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk, Nietzsche’s and Wittgenstein’s ‘literary philosophy’ and Karl Kraus’s ‘philosophical literature’. In this manner, the self that is made into the object of sacrificial violence consistently refuses pacification by any particular identity, art, discipline or genre, insisting on exempting himself or herself from any familiar abode. As regards Crnjanski, it suffices to examine the unprecedented conundrum of Doppelgängers in his Diary about Čarnojević that has not ceased to puzzle its interpreters from its first publication until today. I have already pointed out the substantial overlapping and intersections between the narrator and the Dalmatian loiterer who was considered by the majority of critics to be Čarnojević himself. As one more attentive commentator has pointed out, this does not really make sense, since the book is not about the loiterer but about the narrator, the son of the wood trader Egon Čarnojević, who merely likens himself, his father and his mother to the Dalmatian and his family members (Ješić 236–242).30 However, if the narrator is this Čarnojević from the title, the etymological connection with the author’s name Crnjanski 30  It is probably not accidental that a Serb from Vojvodina feels affinity with another “Serb from abroad” (the so-called Prečanin), i.e. Dalmatia. After all, the narrator spends his

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becomes conspicuous. The Serbian word “crn” (black) matches the Russian root “čarn” in these names’ composition and, if we consider that in 1690 Patriarch Arsenije Čarnojević led a large migration of Serbs from Ottoman lands into the Habsburg north, the allusion to the ‘ancestor’ who implanted the narrator his incurable migratory drive is irresistible.31 That the nomadic narrator Čarnojević might be Crnjanski’s double is also suggested by the many intersections of his life trajectory with Crnjanski’s nomadic biography. Expectedly, there are divergences too, such as the wedding or his mother’s death. Besides, although The Diary is a first person narrative, as a diary normally requires, the title states that it is about Čarnojević, i.e. a novel in which the author does not match the narrator. Being a novel that plays the diary, it almost naturally continues to replace originals with Doppelgängers. While the author thus detaches himself from the narrator (as the novelistic genre requires), he simultaneously establishes connections with the Dalmatian loiterer. It is not only that the latter’s father is a notary (Dnevnik o Čarnojeviću 49), as Crnjanski’s father was,32 but the loiterer is, beyond that, a “Sumatraist” (as Crnjanski was himself). Completely detached from all earthly matters, that is to say, he stubbornly refuses to be socially, ideologically or religiously identified even at the cost of torture (48, 57). He openly preaches Crnjanski’s (i.e. the author’s) youthful “Sumatraist” program that points out the contemporary world’s enforced migrations and concomitant catapulting of humans out of their familiar horizons. The War made human destinies irrevocably interconnected, which is why one cannot isolate his/her domestic sphere from the remotest parts of the world anymore (Lirika Itake 145–153). Yet far from merging with the Dalmatian, the author introduces a third Doppelgänger, next to the student life in Vienna, as depicted at the beginning of the novel, exclusively in such “Dalmatian” company. 31  Besides, as child, the narrator is surrounded by the icons depicting Patriarch Arsenije Čarnojević (34). 32  We receive contradicting information concerning the narrator’s father. In an inserted address to an uncertain Dalmatian friend (probably from the Vienna student circle), the narrator speaks of his father as the wood trader Egon Čarnojević (49). Ješić takes this as a proof that he and not the Dalmatian loiterer is Čarnojević (as many interpreters claim), since the loiterer’s father was notary (239). However, at the beginning of the novel, the narrator’s father “leaves behind his fat notaries”, departing for somewhere faraway where he used to “scribble whole days” (9). Since Crnjanski’s father was also a notary, his entanglement with the loiterer on the one hand and the narrator on the other resists an unambiguous disentanglement. After all, the inventiveness of Crnjanski’s memory that freely mixed, combined and forged is nowadays an established fact (Ješić 51–52, 241) and the Diary can be regarded as one of its exemplary manifestations.

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aforementioned two (Čarnojević and the Dalmatian), Petar Raitch (Dnevnik o Čarnojeviću 45). His data in the medical record—religion: Greek-Orthodox, status: bachelor, age: 23 years, diagnosis: tuberculosis—that was teasingly put together by his hospital roommates and hung on the hospital bed, matches those of Crnjanski who was hospitalized in Vienna in 1915.33 Two further pieces of data—profession: “migrant cannon fodder” and vocation: “king’s murderer”—mock the Habsburg perception of the Serbs at the time; after all, the nurse tells “Raitch” it would have been better if he had said he is a Croat (45). But he did not renounce his nation due to his passionate attachment to its fatal non-belonging and homelessness: “I belong to nobody, neither have I got anybody, neither the brother, nor the servant, nor the master. […] We have always lived in foreign lands. We were on the move, forever on the move” (21–22; 24).34 It has escaped the attention of the novel’s interpreters, if I am not mistaken, that “Raitch” is not so much a personal name but rather a collective name. The Austrians of Crnjanski’s time still used the term Raitzen to designate the Orthodox population in Vojvodina that had arrived there from the Ottoman Raitzenland (Serbian “Raška”), lead by its Patriarch, toward the end of the seventeenth century.35 By labelling the narrator Čarnojević as Raitch (along with labels such as the “migrant cannon fodder” and “king’s murderer”) the hospital roommates obviously mock the Austrian stigmatization of the nomadic Orthodox Raitzen. No doubt they hit the mark with this label because Čarnojević adhered to his Orthodox descent in the radical manner of the Habsburg-era Vojvodina Serbs, which translates as, say, “more papal than the Pope [i.e. the Ottoman Serb] himself”. Already as a small child, Čarnojević/ Raitch was raised in rage against the cruel “Turks”, the “people with red fezzes who incessantly slaughtered and killed. I was told one evening how people were impaled [by them]” (9). The old icons around him represented the Turks with “knives in hand […] in front of the trenches” (13). As a result, the narrator’s self, itself the Doppelgänger of Crnjanski’s self, appears to be divided between the Dalmatian’s indifferent cosmopolitanism and Raitch’s sacrificial 33  In his Commentaries to Ithaca, Crnjanski himself points to the connection between Raitch’s fake diagnosis and his own (invented by a Serbian doctor to release him from the frontline) (Itaka i komentari 92). 34  Recall the poem “Hymn” quoted in footnote 6: “We have nothing. Neither God nor master./ Our God is Blood.” Or: “We have had neither home nor mother,/ We moved our blood.” (Nemamo ničeg. Ni Boga ni gospodara./ Naš Bog je Krv. - Ni majke ni doma ne imadosmo, /selismo našu krv.) (Lirika Itake 15). 35  Hofmmansthal applies the term Raitzenland in his Rosenkavalier (“Dramen V” 14), which takes place in the 1740s, but the concept must have been familiar to an audience from 1910 when this opera libretto was composed, since otherwise he would not have applied it.

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attachment to his nation.36 To add to this confusion, Crnjanski told Zoran Sekulić in a June 1972 interview for Student that “I have nothing to do with the marriage of that Raitch in Čarnojević” (Ješić 241). Obviously, in The Diary about Čarnojević Crnjanski was at pains to disentangle the antagonistic constellation of his self by proliferating Doppelgängers neither of whom completely fitted the ‘original’ but merely reproduced one of its facets. In fact both, Crnjanski and Krleža dissolved their selves into contradictory multitudes of figures in such a way as to renounce the original unity of these selves whatsoever. Nonetheless time and again, terrified by this outcome, they sacrificed this vertiginous multitude for organic communion in order to regain a soothing subordinate identity for their selves. In response to the new East-Central European states’ sovereignty politics, which had engaged sacrificial violence via its narratives of collective dispossession, some post-imperial literary works thus redirected violence toward their own sovereignty, exposing their selves to a consistent estrangement and lamination. If, to counter the slippery age of indeterminacy, the official political narratives aimed at the sovereign collective identity, literary narratives systematically exempted themselves from it, following the early German Romanticist guideline of “I am what I am not” (Luhmann, “Individuum, Individualität, Individualismus” 244) in their search for an appropriate identity. As the ‘proper self’ was now pushed outside the politically antagonized world and placed beyond the criteria of worldly proof (Beller 235), all that remained in the world was an inner multiplicity of warring selves. Arthur Schnitzler, who seems to have invented this multiplicity in his novel The Road into the Open (Der Weg ins Freie, 1908), in fact polemicized with Otto Weininger’s solution in Sex and Character (Geschlecht und Charakter, 1903) to re-center the disaggregated Jewish self through its religious anchoring (Beller 217–235). These far-reaching polemics that divided the technologies of the Jewish (as well as non-Jewish) 36  Reminding us that he himself was an exemplary representative of the Raitzen, Crnjanski pointed out his youthful obsession with his nation in commentary to his “Ode to the Gallows”: “My patriotism sometimes had the form of an inherited family madness” (Itaka i komentari 99). The overlapping with Raitch is obvious. For his part, the narrator also evokes from the early childhood, next to the horrible icons and hearsay around him, the songs his mother used to sing him in which “the slaughtering and killing, and burning villages” were described. His young psyche was systematically antagonized: “Oh, how much I have shouted because of that” (Dnevnik o Čarnojeviću 10). This is why the author’s entanglement with the narrator, which in turn bifurcates into the cosmopolitan Dalmatian loiterer and the nationalist Raitch, resists an unambiguous disentanglement. The narrator’s identity division matches Crnjanski’s. The Diary about Čarnojević embodies the state of indeterminacy, i.e. confronted and intermingled options, of the age that engenders it.

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selves in fin-de-siècle Vienna gets, so to say, internalized in Crnjanski’s and Krleža’s work, turning into an internal polemic of each of them with the antagonist ‘voice of consciousness’. Yet as this literary identity search polarized their selves’ internal others in the same way as their political identity search antagonized their selves’ external others, it brought all but expected relief, which is why Crnjanski and Krleža tried time and again to redeem their selves through their political identification or national anchoring. Crnjanski immersed his self in such an “oceanic feeling” in the late 1920s, making the fresh Slavic blood triumph over the old Europe.37 Krleža launched a polemic against this bellicose national turn in Crnjanski’s work in his essay “M. Crnjanski on war” from 1934 (“M. Crnjanski o ratu”). However he himself was not immune to merging his self into a national communion, as I develop at some length in Chapter Three. Inasmuch as national identity constitutively needs an antagonist to achieve its much desired distinction, both writers periodically integrated their tormented selves into their sacrificial national communities in order to rescue them from the delineated splitting and splintering. In this way, they hoped to avert violence from themselves toward those whom they found responsible for their dispossession but ultimately only re-induced polarization, which again returned them to self-torment.

37  For this advocacy of the Slavic barbarians as the exhausted Europe’s refreshing source, see especially his 1930 travelogue “Love in Toscana” (“Ljubav u Toskani”). Putting forth this idea, Crnjanski involuntarily resumed Herder’s “generosity” toward the Slavs. The German intellectual trusted that, as the Slavs still live in the infantile, mythic phase of human history, they can help the more mature European nations recall their childhood, rejuvenate and thus strengthen themselves. Through a revitalizing appropriation of Slavic cultures he attempted to maintain the domination of German culture. By placing thus his nationalism at the service of metropolitan imperialism, Crnjanski, in post-imperial surroundings, anticipated the forthcoming self-dispossessing behavior of postcolonial peoples (Guha 74).

Chapter 2

Disciplining the Wild(wo)men: Borisav Stanković’s Not Wannabe Bride and Janko Polić Kamov’s Wannabe Artist Although Europe’s traditional empires disaggregated in different ways, their ruination was usually triggered by a multiplication and intensification of conflicts between their cores and their peripheries. Since “empires come into existence only as a result of the extension of core control over some potential periphery” (Motyl 23), their administrations confront the resilience of their peripheries from the outset. However, the latter only gain awareness of an imbalance between them and the cores over the course of a modernization that, although intended to eliminate this gap, actually deepens it. The project of assimilation unwillingly produces a conflict. Once put under pressure to modernize their rule, the imperial centers trained, socialized and politicized the same peripheral elites who became their gravediggers (Barkey 110). In much the same way as the tradition of the imperial Ottoman-Islamic patriotism paved the way for Kemal Pasha Atatürk’s foundation of the modern Turkish nation-state (Mardin 116), the Dual Monarchy’s peripheral national elites could not have established their new nation-states without the support of the imperial administrative, communicational, economic, and cultural networks, which were built with the very intention to prevent their establishment (Déak 129–130). But since empires, as it were, invisibly ‘stroke back,’ it also holds vice versa. Rather than being suspended in their transitions from the cores to peripheries and from empires to nation-states, the imperial legacies merely underwent a re-signifying. Instead of being antiquated, empires were simply translated, penetrating their political antagonists’ very core. That is to say, cores and peripheries, empires and nation-states, operated as one another’s unintended (re)producers. “As intimately intertwined subjects, they developed in dialogue with each other, rather than as binary opposites” (Judson, The Habsburg Empire 9–10). This achieved a particularly clear expression in their liminal zones, the realms of their spatial and temporal dis/ juncture. In the following, I shall focus on two such “translation zones” (Apter)—in both the geopolitical and historical senses of these words—the first pertaining to the Ottoman frontier as epitomized in Borisav Stanković’s novel Impure Blood (Belgrade, 1910) and the second to the Austro-Hungarian frontier as

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epitomized in Janko Polić Kamov’s novel The Drained Swamp (Zagreb, 1909). The very titles of these novels indicate the common geopolitical perception of these in-between zones as “impure”—i.e. mixed, hybrid, contaminated1—and “swampy”, i.e. indistinct, murky, amorphous areas, at least from the centers’ points of view.2 The small provincial town of Vranje, in which Stanković’s novel takes place toward the end of the nineteenth century,3 became Serbian in 1878 after the defeated Ottomans withdrew some fifteen kilometers to the South. For its inhabitants, this corroborated serious social and economic transformations. Kamov’s hero, travelling from one city to another (Zagreb—Venice—Zagreb— Rijeka—Rome—Florence—Milan—Zagreb—Turin—Genoa—Marseille— Naples), traverses various geopolitical borders, some of which were drawn just a few decades before and some of which would be redrawn soon after. These reconfigurations engendered huge social and ideological turbulences. Unlike the titles, the years of the novels’ publication (respectively emergence)4 announce the historical liminality of the time in question. Stanković composed his novel in the Kingdom of Serbia, which was only acknowledged internationally as an autonomous state in 1878. Kamov wrote his novel in the Kingdom of Croatia and Slavonia, at that time in the Hungarian part of the Dual Monarchy, just several years before the empire’s dissolution. Less than a decade after they finished their novels that dealt with developments before the empires’ 1  The Central European mixture of languages, cultures, and customs already induced anxiety and discontent in the nationally inspired intellectuals by the end of the eighteenth century (Wolff 25–35). With time, this perception deteriorated. In the second half of the nineteenth century German nationalists perceived their Eastern provinces (the so-called Ostmarken) as endangered by the “foamy splashes of an approaching large Slavic wave” (Thum 52), which in turn generated Wilhelm II’s radical ‘defensive’ measures. Finally, “[t]hroughout interwar East Central Europe, fears of ‘internal enemies’ and ‘fifth colonies,’ fears of losing control over the fringes of the state territory, and fears of proving unable to unify the national society led to the policy of forced ethnic homogenization” (55). 2  Joseph Roth’s narrator in The Radetzky March describes Ukraine, the Dual Monarchy’s utmost periphery, as a “swamp” that swallows the lives of uninitiated settlers, soldiers and officers (141), while the natives circulate across it as “living ghosts” “jammed in” between “West and East,” (139), struggling to get to grips with its indeterminacy. Ukraine as the civilized world’s godforsaken margin (this is what the Russian word Ukraine in fact denotes), with its streets without names and houses without numbers, and with its frogs incessantly chirruping, (141, 222) resolutely resists all of the democratic changes characteristic of the center (184). For the perception of imperial borderlands as populated by the backward and underdeveloped noble savages, see Promitzer. 3  Vranje’s population amounted to about 8,000 inhabitants at the time the novel deals with. 4  Kamov’s novel was written between 1906 and 1909 but its manuscript was discovered later and only published in 1952.

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breakups, Stanković’s and Kamov’s peripheral kingdoms became constituents in one and the same multinational state, namely the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (1918).5 My thesis is that both novels subtly reflect these complex translation zones that, on the one hand, gave rise to them and, on the other, make objects of their meticulous narrative analysis. Within their political, social and cultural frames of reference, these borderlands prove to have been (1) places of interaction inhabited by switching and malleable identities, (2) apt sites for all kinds of collective and individual fantasies, projects and representations, and (3) stages of a peaceful coexistence of their constituencies and, at the same time, an intense violence between them (Bartov and Weitz 1). It was precisely the democratization of borderlands as connected with the growingly ethnic stereotyping of their populations—both of which took place in the last decades of the nineteenth century—that changed the peaceful coexistence of their constituencies into enmities. (Wingfield) This adds an important historical dimension to the concept of borderlands, which makes them associate, through their unique developments that are unimaginable in regular states, the so-called states of exception. In both novels, this peculiar combination of geopolitical in-betweens and historical states of exception—or the redoubling of the spatial by temporal shatterzones—enables individual technologies of self-exemption that are unimaginable in the culturally homogeneous and historically frozen peripheral communities of the time.6 In Stanković’s novel these revolutionary technologies are engaged by the figure of a designated bride and in Kamov’s novel by that of a self-designated artist.7 None of them are willing to succumb 5  Barkey and van Hagen point out the artificial manner in which the victorious allies constructed the new states after the First World War and the difficulties which such arbitrary decisions created for their national elites: “[T]he Ottoman and Habsburg empires shared borderland populations over which they occasionally competed and even waged war. These one-time cross-border populations later served as the cores for unified nation-states, whose elites in turn had to incorporate two different imperial legacies in their emerging national political culture” (183). 6  In his Philosophy of the Province (Filosofija palanke; the Serbian word palanka designates a small peripheral town, an in-between of the village and city proper), the Serbian novelist and essayist Radomir Konstantinović singles out two characteristics of peripheral communities: (1) they fiercely seal themselves off against all that is foreign and (2) they deliberately exempt themselves from history (Konstantinović, Filosofija 7–8, 202–203). 7  Janko Polić derived the supplement to his name “Kamov” from Noah’s son Ham (in Croatian Kam; Kamov, the one who belongs to Kam’s kin) who was dammed by his father for having looked at his drunken, nude body, in contradistinction to his brothers Shem and Japhet who decently spared their father this shame. Not only in relation to his own father but rather all

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to the tacit ‘tomb rules’ of their milieus, whose taming of their ‘wild(wo)men’ turns out to have been even harsher than that applied by the (post-)imperial metropoles upon their ‘wild’ peripheries. It is well known that the victims of abuse, in this case the ‘wild’ (post-)imperial peripheries, become more brutal tyrants than those who subject(ed) them.8 Besides, “local violence tends to be particularly gruesome and gratuitous, perhaps precisely because it is visited upon neighbors and acquaintances, not foreigners and outsiders” (Bartov and Weitz 12). While Stanković and Kamov uncovered how their ‘wild(wo)men’ exempt themselves from the “capillary” disciplinary measures of their peripheral social milieus which were firmly determined to suppress their individualities,9 they in fact simultaneously exempted themselves from the restrictive rules of their own literary provinces. Through such a clandestine redoubling of self-exemption, both protagonists and their authors profiled themselves as individual ‘wild(wo)men’ in the milieus that were blamed by (post)imperial centers for their collective ‘wildness.’ Put in Hegelian terms, both protagonists and their authors thereby exercised a so-called double negation: they negated their peripheral identities as established by a geopolitical negation. In addition, the protagonists’ negation of their inherited social identities is redoubled by the authors’ negation of their inherited literary identities. However, due to the divergent borderland constellations that induce these self-reconfiguring projects, each of them displays various forms, ramifications and outcomes. This remains to be examined in more detail. social authorities, Kamov considered himself to be a descendant of Noah’s shameless and rebellious son. He was expelled from his secondary school because he spat in the face of a teacher who gave him a positive note—simply because he was the son of a well-reputed citizen, according to the adolescent. His novelistic hero Arsen Toplak typically redoubles (t)his model. For more on Arsen’s and Kamov’s ambivalent rebellion against their fathers, see footnote 31. 8  A case in point is the harsh Magyar nationalism in their part of the Dual Monarchy after the Hungarians managed to gain their national autonomy from their ‘oppressors’. It gradually deteriorated until, “by the turn of the century if not earlier, Hungarian patriotism was largely indistinguishable in official policy from Magyar chauvinism” (Cornwall 183). This Magyarization corroborated, for example, the Slovak anti-Hungarian stance that, after the First World War, was channeled toward the Czechs as the new oppressors. (Haslinger 169–182) Parallel to interlocking themselves, that is to say, animosities were translated into enmities. 9  According to Konstantinović, since the spirit of the province is committed to the creation of typologies, it ferociously “opposes everything that is individual-degenerate, i.e. sticks out from community, being unabsorbed by it” (Filosofija 201).

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Borisav Stanković’s Impure Blood

Impure Blood opens with an extensive genealogy of its heroine’s family that, significantly, is composed in the mode of a hearsay. This modality of preserving knowledge, characteristic of oral cultures from ‘time immemorial,’ provides no verifiable evidence for the transmitted ‘facts’ but instead authorizes them by that which later came to be called “collective memory”. According to the inventor of this term, the French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, the collective memory’s reconstruction technique—in contradistinction to that of history, which claims universal validity for its ‘facts’—is verified by a particular social group, i.e. only those ‘facts’ that are in harmony with this group’s present needs and interests are retained. Within such groups, all individual reminiscences draw on collective memory structures that outlive their continuity. Strictly following the principle of kinship relations, these groups allocate predetermined identity types to all of their individuals by paying no attention whatsoever to these individuals’ possibly diverging self-identifications (Halbwachs 70). Were the groups to consider them, this would open the door to disagreement and transformation and thus endanger their continuity and survival (Konstantinović, Filosofija 197–198, 203). Contrary to the external historical gaze that emphasizes difference and change, collective memory “can only see itself internally and can only recognize itself […] as essentially unchanging” (Niethammer 92). Halbwachs claims that external (historical) perspective can only influence this internally homogeneous self-perception if the given group consents to such influences (Halbwachs 68), but it usually offers resistance to them in order to safeguard its self-reproduction (75). However, he admits that such groups can only resist the forces of their disintegration for as long as their memory is alive, i.e. continuously recalled and refreshed through circulation (73–74). Some events nonetheless disturb their smooth reproduction—like occasional switches of their members from one group to another (79)—by opening them to a restructuring. But the problem with this argument is that the hindrances placed in the way of the groups’ self-maintenance are more than occasional. Halbwachs neglects the internal and external forces of disintegration that ceaselessly act below and above the level of their restricted horizon (Niethammer 89). In fact, it was in the aftermath of the Great War that violently disaggregated such social bonds that he had retroactively, in a kind of defense reaction, homogenized these groups’ memory horizons (92). By uncritically surrendering himself to such a romantic nostalgia for “natural communities” he downplayed these communities’ retrograde and conservative orientation

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and overestimated their oppositional and subversive character. But such mythification that was stored in oral tradition was already established in the second half of the eighteenth century as a response by a self-enclosed collective memory to the threat of its deracination through modernization. From around the time of the French Revolution the past no longer served as a faithful guide to the future, but was increasingly conceived as a lost lore, sacrificed by the present (Fritzsche 5). We can trace this embittered response to the modernist administration, rationalization, and anonymization of human lives from Rousseau, through Herder, to German Romanticists, early Marx and Engels, on to, say, Ferdinand Tönnies’ Community and Society of 1887. This long melancholic shadow is cast on the accelerated modernization by those individuals and groups who for one reason or another felt themselves to be dispossessed by it. As the process of modernization authorized many more people to take part in historical developments, those groups and individuals who found themselves hurt through the required radical emancipation from the past instead proposed a reattachment to it through its reinterpretation. As Peter Fritzsche put it, people launched such projects with the aim of synchronizing their experience of loss with that of their unknown like-minded contemporaries, i.e. “to connect their personal ordeals with larger social narratives” (8). However, even though this was a “profoundly liberating” gesture of an “escape from the imperatives of the present”, it necessarily proceeded selectively, i.e. at the price of a renewed exclusion of “people(s) without history” (10). Not everybody was allowed, let alone called upon, to reimagine history by building in such a way their own individual, group, or national personhood. Imperial peripheries, for example, due to their extremely deficient means, media and influence, were, on the contrary, doomed to an apocryphal existence as ‘zones of indeterminacy’ (Agamben, The Open 37) or ‘living ghosts’ amidst the Western personified history. Ever since its original judicial performance, personhood is valuable exactly to the extent to which it is not applicable to all […] Only if there are men (and women) who are not completely, or not at all, considered persons, can other be or become such. […] The process of personalization coincides […] with the depersonalization or reification of others. Esposito 209

This explains the difference between, say, French and Serbian frustrations with history. In contrast to Halbwachs’ unconsciously defensive sociological

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argument in favor of memory against history,10 Konstantinović’s philosophy of the small provincial town (palanka)11 insists that the palanka’s convulsive selfexemption from historical change is an act of revenge for having been forgotten and abandoned by history. The Serbian philosopher sees this self-exemption as generated by the pressure of historical reality toward an individualization and differentiation of communities that subverts the palanka’s cohesion and homogeneity. The spirit of the palanka, typically located in the borderland between the urban and the rural, is “the spirit of unity wounded by the individual on his/her way to individuality” (Filosofija 207).12 It turns its traumatic internal solidarization as induced by its exclusion from history—a disquieting process of change that already circulates through its body—into its most precious principle and privilege (7; 221–222). This argument about frustration by history as the trigger for the mobilization of collective memory anticipates the much later theses by Hayden White and Aleida Assmann that the revitalization of oral “functional memory” emerges under the pressure of the new anonymous techniques of memory storage that etiolate and devastate these intimate “personal archives” (White 52–55; Assmann, Erinnerungsräume 133– 143; “Zur Mediengeschichte” 48–50). By blaming grand history, the rapid development of which victimizes the province because it is too poorly equipped for this speed, reads Konstantinović’s argument, the godforsaken margin simultaneously revolts against its own ‘spoiled’ consciousness, the ‘contaminated aspects’ of which it vigorously exteriorizes and accuses of being externally 10  In the 1970s and 1980s, this advocacy of memory against history, as endorsed by the impulse to save involuntary memory from its falsification through voluntary memory, migrated from sociology to historiography, taking the form of so-called oral history. Following the thread of modernist and postmodernist literature, oral history sought to pluralize and diversify the historical truth. However, to avoid the possible aberrations of such an undertaking, it was subjected to various verification procedures characteristic of written history. Sciences, as the highest accomplishments of written cultures, are profoundly skeptical of oral sources (Assmann, Erinnerungsräume 265–278), which explains why they tend to exclude peripheral cultures from history on the basis of their deficient written sources. However, this in turn stimulates literature to save them from oblivion. The gap between history and memory thus paradoxically reemerges through both sides’ attempts to eliminate it. 11  In line with the philosophical critique of sciences that was typical at the time (1969), Konstantinović claims that the palanka’s convulsive self-defense against all foreign influences underlies the sociological “mania” of putting the whole world in its pre-established terms (202–203, footnote). Philosophy in contrast, due to its constitutively open spirit (197), opposes such leveling down of its methodology to pre-given criteria (204). 12  Here and in the following all translations are mine unless otherwise noticed.

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imposed, foreign and evil (Filosofija 18–20; 202–203). To avoid confronting oneself, it blames the other in a compulsive defensive reaction that adheres to strictly moral terms (29–33). Thus the provincial community turns its harsh punishment—the denial of the right to a history as forced upon it by the world—into a persistent rejection of this world and its history and, moreover, hate against them as the culprits for its dispossession. The province, however, can contest history as much as it wants, it nonetheless cannot get out of it because its in-between consciousness is irrevocably infused with it (198–199). The mainstream reception of Impure Blood also attributed the delineated romantic nostalgia for the bygone days of collective harmony to its author. Stanković supposedly composed his novel in order to restore the memory of the small provincial community that was doomed to disappearance.13 Yet being powerfully affected by historical consciousness as it is, the novel’s narrative technique does not really support this thesis. The hearsay modality of the first four chapters, in which the palanka’s collective memory exemplarily comes into being, appears to be disconcerted and shaken in its self-confidence. References such as “it was said … known … remembered,” “it seems,” “there were rumors,” “it was whispered,” or “so many fairy tales and stories were tied to this event” proliferate as if to counter a growing incredulity, which ultimately must be directly refuted: “This is not a lie. Living people still talk about it and swear” (Nečista krv 43). Since the hearsay summarizes vague collective memories from a long historical distance—as the addressed chapters clearly indicate through their condensation of repetitive past events—the disbelief that it induces is anything but surprising.14 Based on the plethora of written sources, historiography does not trust the unreliable mechanisms of oral memory. On the eve of the twentieth century, a more precise and concrete knowledge that relies on the individual eye-witnessing is demanded. Therefore the narrator occasionally interrupts the dominant mode of hearsay by delving into his figures’ individual stream of thoughts, such as when the family’s Primordial Father haji Trifun asks himself why his son disobeys him: is this because he, 13  Milan Bogdanović represents a more or less common opinion when he describes Stanković as a most local, regional writer, “most tightly connected to a narrow space […], to a particular small world” of Vranje (Bogdanović 6). See also Gligorić 66, Stanisavljević and Zlatanović. 14  In fact, Stanković himself did not shape his portrait of Vranje from first-hand evidence but, as he himself admitted, on the basis of the hearsay (Stanisavljević 304–305). His ‘facts’ are sometimes inaccurate, although not just because of his second-hand sources but also because he dealt with them, as he explained, in a literary, i.e. freely amalgamating, way (Zlatanović 52).

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corporeally weakened, has lost his former strength and reputation or because his son receives his mother’s surreptitious support? (33) However, not only do some figures face such doubts but the narrator himself also becomes occasionally uncertain as to how to disentangle the thoughts of his figures. Describing the father’s iterative endearments over his small daughter, the heroine of this novel, he cannot detect their real origins: He cannot satisfy the need to look at her, as if repeatedly finding and remembering something in Sofka’s eyes and mouth. Who knows what? Something he never stopped longing for and did not find? Or because such a beautiful Sofka is not a male, his successor? Or because her thin lips, childish but black eyes and a small, dark forehead, with already long hair, remind him of her mother, as he saw her for the first time, the first time he was delighted by her? (49–50) The consciousness of the figures becomes impenetrable due to the introduction of a division within the formerly organic world of the palanka, which was allegedly made all of one piece—a division between public and private spaces. Concerning this division, Konstantinović points out the palanka’s systematic refusal to acknowledge any distinction whatsoever between the actors (on the enlightened stage) and spectators (in the darkened audience). Everything that is individual and new is subjected to an incessant normative labeling and thus relegated to its well-trodden place on the palanka’s public stage of social (stereo)types that brutally forbids any right to privacy and exemption (Filosofija 20–25). The determinism of the palanka’s self-enclosed world completely denies individual wills by consistently redirecting the critical stance toward one’s own self toward the others (30–33). However, in Impure Blood, private secrecy perforates the public life of the palanka. Everybody has something to hide, which makes him/her compulsively lie and pretend. This proliferation of internal gaps within the subjects points to the disintegration of the palanka’s “principle of publicity, principle of daylight cast on each and every secret with the incorruptibility of a reflector” (29). After this principle had collapsed as a result of the turbulent political and social transformation of Vranje, people were left with only partial access to the truth, which in addition could always be mistaken. This oriented the outstanding individuals toward a quest for the secrets of others who probably knew something that they did not. Accordingly, Stanković’s central figures in this novel (the daughter Sofka and, to a much lesser degree, her mother Todora and father Mita) are seized by a lust for knowledge, i.e. a curiosity for that which in their familiar life-world remains out of sight, indicating that the modern

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“observation of latency” in the first place affects the palanka’s victims.15 The vast majority of the population, after being confronted with this temptation, rushes to return back under the protection of the palanka’s rumor in order not to become the object of its stigmatizing mockery. It is better to spitefully and maliciously stigmatize others than to be branded oneself by their devastating orchestration (20–25). In this manner, the tragic gap between the hero who exposes him/herself to hearsay and the chorus that keeps a comfortable distance from him/her enters the palanka, the forcefully homogenized world of which denies and rejects such a gap by definition (28). Consider the beginning of chapter three, which briefly addresses the Serbian liberation of Vranje from the Ottoman domination, the concomitant liberation of serfs from the landowners and the distribution of the land parcels to the previously dispossessed peasants. Sofka’s father, it is said, left the family 15  The German sociologist Niklas Luhmann (“Das Erkenntnisprogramm” 46) traces the genealogy of this “observation of latency” in the following way: “The technique is some two centuries old. It was probably first practiced in the novel, then in the counterEnlightenment, then in the critique of ideology, that is, in the first place always with the better-knowing attitude. The first-order observer was in such a way removed into the zone of the harmless, the naive, or he was treated as someone who, without knowing it, has something to hide. The better-knowing nurtured itself by a suspicion and the generalization of the suspicion principle enabled whole disciplines—from psychoanalysis to sociology—to establish themselves with additional competences in a world in which everyone knows or believes to know for what purpose and in which situation he acts”. Luhmann’s thesis that the investigation of latency beyond the familiar reality was started by the modern novel as its chief representative comes close to the thesis of the French philosopher Jacques Rancière as proposed in The Politics of Literature. Both interpret the novel as the initiator of the “hermeneutics of suspicion” that was thereafter transferred to modern sciences. My thesis is that in post-imperial Europe, due to the postponed establishment of nation-states, modern novels emerged as the promoters of plural democracy about a century later, i.e. at the beginning of the twentieth century. However, even then these novels could not be narrated in the same way since the democracy of the post-imperial nation-states, due to the different circumstances of its emergence, came to be different. “In western Europe the process of nation-building went hand in hand with democratization, a constant, gradual, and always contested extension of the franchise. In the post-imperial settings, civil societies were either barely established or largely mimicked, while conservative, often aristocratic or corporatist, elites continued to rule. Whereas in western Europe, the process of nation-building can be seen as a product of continual negotiation between states and societies, in the states under consideration here the nation-building process was carried out largely from above with very little input from social groups and their institutions.” (Barkey and van Hagen 187) This suppresses the free polyphonic development of the East-Central European modern novel.

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by joining the withdrawn ‘Turks’.16 The narrator spares the readership any explanation as to why this had happened and why he, while residing abroad, paid less and less visits to his family in Serbia and instead lets Sofka search for a plausible answer. She notices that each time he returned to the Turks “her mother would drag herself around for several days completely broken and deadened because only she knew everything” (Nečista krv 53). We are now switching to the supposedly all-knowing mother’s consciousness: she knew that the father merely pretends to be trading and making business there, or not to be able to overcome the habit of socializing and mixing with the Turks, that he pretends for the palanka’s public eyes but she herself did not fall victim of his “show”. She knew that the gradual pushing of the Turks out of Serbia (that began even before Vranje was liberated, 53) brought about his impoverishment and humiliation by his former serfs, and that he flees Serbia to avoid this shame (54). However, even if she knew all that, the narrator tells us that she decided to back up his masquerade for the palanka’s eyes by taking advantage of some former family serfs’ charity (55). Thus at holidays, when numerous relatives and neighbors regularly visit the house, she and her daughter displayed generous hospitality, wore expensive clothes and presented their best mood even though they had been ruined by the recent developments. Yet even if the mother continues the father’s masquerade—the narrator now returning to the daughter’s perspective—Sofka does not allow herself to be deceived by it, in much the same manner that her mother resisted the illusion created by her father. Reading the scattered indices surrounding her, she dismantles not only her mother’s scenario but also her relatives’ excessively generous behavior as their endeavors to avert her attention from the impending catastrophe—the purchase of the house and the family’s downfall (57). However, this truth that she distills through the denuding of the others’ simulation turns out to be wrong. That is to say, after the homogeneous hearsay mode dissolves into shifting and heterogeneous individual observations, the reader learns that undoing the others’ pretense does not necessarily uncover 16  In the novel, the Ottomans are consistently designated as ‘Turks,’ which was usual practice at the time. However, it should not passed unnoticed that, toward the end of the nineteenth century, the borderlands underwent political reconfiguration, requiring their population to reorient their attachments. Once the sites of exchange, fluidity, and hybridity, they gradually became sites of opposition and othering. Already empires, which in the last decades of the nineteenth century classified and categorized their population, expected their borderland people to belong to one and only one ethnic, racial and national group (Anderson 163–185). Through such an essentialization, the other gradually became an enemy that, as such, was necessary to unify the destabilized self (Wingfield 1–2).

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the truth. Even if one figure sees something that the others hide from themselves and others, this does not mean that his or her own dismantling observation is bereft of its own blind spot. The same is the case for the narrator who, as we have seen, is also dispossessed of the whole truth. This narrative mode of a continuously shifting “observation of latency”—or a successive taking of the other’s point of view—suggests that the palanka had already fallen victim to the modernization that it is at constant pains to reject. The simultaneously frustrating and liberating condition of being exposed to the plurality of the truth—liberating because the palanka’s supervision of its individuals is totalitarian and cruel (Filosofija 22)—is something all the novel’s agencies have to contend with, from haji Trifun and the father Mita, over the mother Todora and Sofka, to the narrator himself. In sum, Stanković’s complex mixture of narrative modes sides with Konstantinović’s philosophical questioning of the palanka’s collective memory rather than with Halbwachs’ sociological nostalgia for it. In this novel, the hearsay of collective memory is, from the outset, presented as a convulsive action—compensatory, accelerated, and interminable—the carriers of which are problematized in their motivation rather than uncritically endorsed.17 Even if a supposedly ancestral collective truth that all descendants are obliged to implement does exist, they nonetheless permanently disrespect, neglect and violate it. Sofka’s scandalous family history testifies to this: a despotic and jealous forefather (Nečista 35–36), his wasteful descendants who forge unwelcome friendships with the Turks, Greeks, and Gypsies and laze, celebrate, fornicate and gamble (39–40), a perverse great-grandmother who commits suicide (41), a prodigal grandfather whose wife commits sin with his mentally ill brother (43), and his sister who “mixes” with the Turks just as he himself 17  It warrants attention that, through such an interrogation of collective memory, Stanković shapes precisely the borderland Vranje palanka (i.e. an in-between of the village and city that is, in turn, located in an in-between of the state and empire), since such borderlands were especially fruitful soils for nurturing nostalgic back-projections. One case in point is Galicia, a site of multiethnic coexistence that was constructed through a retroactive fantasy after the region had undergone some of the most brutal ethnic violence and exterminations (Bartov and Weitz 8–9). Another case in point is Central Europe, which was, in a typically nostalgic back-projection, characterized by the anticommunist dissident Milan Kundera as “the greatest variety within the smallest space”. Paradoxically, Central Europe earned this flattering attribute after the Jews had already been almost exterminated, the Germans deported, the linguistic and ethnographic heterogeneity radically reduced, and the area turned into a region of self-enclosed nation-states (Wolff 38). For the politically biased phantasm of Central Europe that was constructed in a polemics against the Eastern European (especially Russian) claims to the region, see also Todorova 140–160.

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did with the Greek women, and who is forced to marry a servant (44). Sofka is of an “impure blood” indeed! The hearsay typically moralistically records these scandals in order to warn against their reemergence but it necessarily fails, since the purification of the palanka’s moralist truth from all violations is by definition an interminable project. Can any truth be implemented without simultaneously being violated? The palanka’s incessant branding of its dissidents is therefore a conditio sine qua non of its self-maintenance. It homogenizes itself only by hating, blaming and destroying its individual interrogations (Filosofija 35, 39). This means that, in profiling Sofka as a hypersensitive observer of alternatives that surround the palanka’s official truth(s), Stanković promotes her into the palanka’s main antagonist. While her parents are at constant pains to hide their secrets from the palanka’s eyes by observing the others as if through a loophole, she discloses the odious backstage of the palanka’s public stage through an open, focused, and indifferent observation. Unlike her fellowcitizens, she is bereft of the need to hide her body and thoughts from the others (Nečista 62). Besides, in direct opposition to the palanka’s collective spirit that forbids individual solitude, she only really enjoys her own company (63–64).18 Finally, in a sharp contrast to the other figures who are too weak to oppose the palanka’s collective spirit and therefore operate as its petty subjects, cunning hypocrites or despotic epitomes, she bravely uses privacy for her self-exempting operations.19 It is due to this self-inflicted isolation that she, as a sovereign 18  According to Konstantinović (Filosofija 204–205), the palanka not only fiercely opposed individual solitude as the exemption of one’s self from his or her collectivity but directly condemned such solitude to death. He quotes several lines from the entry “Cyril the Philosopher” from Vuk Stefanović Karadžić’s Vocabulary, which he interprets as “the blueprint for the Serbian patriarchal civilization”: “A Serbian legend tells that each and every bird, on Cyril’s day, looks for its companion to build a nest and lay eggs, and if some of them do not find him or her, they hang themselves” (204). Konstantinović’s point is that the palanka’s pressure on individuals to socialize themselves rejects split subjects who are preoccupied with their internal redoubling (29)—and Sofka is their epitome, since she most of all enjoys the embrace of “another Sofka,” or the company of her imagined groom, and abhors that of her actual fellow-citizens (Nečista 69–70, 82–83). 19  A soft and warm room in her home, filled with pillows, is the locus of Sofka’s happiness, which is why she abhors the peasant house as her new home after the marriage. The peasant house has a hole in the roof instead of the chimney, through which the smoke from the hearth exits but through which, at the same time, the daylight enters and disturbs Sofka’s much-desired privacy (Nečista 201, 221, 244; Petković 110–112). Before marrying, she left her home only twice, on the occasions of the marriage proposal and the ritual bath before the wedding, each time with deadly feelings (Nečista 122–123, 158). Because her

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observer, establishes unexpected connections, “remembers,” “guesses,” “suspects,” “assumes,” “anticipates,” and “knows”—as the narrator never tires of repeating—and sometimes moreover triumphs over the materialization of her expectations, even if they prove to be misguided. After the narrator transfers to her his authority over the figures and thus raises her to the status of the main focalizer,20 i.e. from the end of chapter three, she becomes a highly attentive, not to say overexcited interpreter of the seemingly insignificant details that surround her: her father’s stinking and shabby appearance, graying moustache and wrinkled neck (99, 124, 131), her parents’ stuffy room in disarray (100–102), the muffled arguments between her mother and aunt in a room above her own (105, 116), the spasms of her father’s toes in stockings (123), or her father-in-law’s sprawled legs and the outstretched fingers of his hand upon his knee (133). But due to her corporeally affected observations (63, 68–69, 88, 116–117, 182–183), her repeated self-redoubling (69–70, 107–111, 117–119), the conflict between her own and foreign points of view (109–110, 116) and between her internal perspective and the palanka’s external perspective (61, 64–68, 180), she often jumps to conclusions and remains vulnerable to fallacies (98, 100, 115). Nevertheless, as precisely such an aberrant, passionately involved, and split searcher of the unpredictable truth, Sofka is an exemplary modern individual. Withdrawn into a creative, almost philosophical solitude, she opens the palanka’s restricted world toward the unknown wide world and its unexplored possibilities. From the palanka’s self-enclosed perspective this is a clearly inimical undertaking that must be punished, since the palanka’s tribal spirit fears nothing so much as divided, lonely, and loitering souls (Filosofija 203–204, 207). But these fierce enemies, the palanka and the modern individual, under closer inspection, mirror one another. In the same way that Vranje exempts itself from the modernization that already circulates through it, Sofka exempts herself from the palanka that structures her drives. The palanka is not only outside but also inside her consciousness where it internally stirs its exteriorization into an enemy. It is this surreptitious and irritating mutual dispossession of the collective and individual, palanka and modernization that induces the scandalous transgressions and outbursts on both sides. Because history dispossesses the palanka by pressing it to individualize its family home offers her a refuge and affords her privacy, she is horrified at the prospect of losing it (59, 111). 20  As Petković has rightly noticed in his reading, this can be interpreted as an act of confidence—since Sofka comes close to the narrator in such a way—and at the same time distance—since she is sometimes mistaken in her conjectures which an all-knowing narrator could not afford him/herself (Petković 17–18).

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life trajectories, the palanka dispossesses Sofka of her individuality by surreptitiously assimilating her. She thus engages in sexual games with the poor stammering Vanko (Nečista 71) and sexual relationships with Vanko’s doubles (240) in the same manner that her grandfather Kavarola’s first wife engaged in a sexual relationship with his insane brother (42); she is coerced by her family to marry a juvenile peasant just as Kavarola’s sister Naza was forced to marry a servant (43); she contemptuously distances herself from her surroundings (62–64) like her educated father did some time ago from his fellow-citizens (46–47); she renounces her feudal pride and marries someone from a lower social stratum by unconsciously repeating the decisions of her father and her mother’s sister (48); she is the epitome of women’s beauty and at the same time of a ‘manly’ arrogant behavior like her great-grandmother Cona (41) and her mother Todora (48). But there are other obstacles to her self-exemption from the palanka too. Even after she replaces the respect and admiration for her father with a pity for him (129), she cannot really liberate herself from the obedient position since, as her father withdraws, her father-in-law Marko intensifies his claim on her (208–211). Well-educated and in permanent amicable relationships with the ‘Turks’ (46–47; 139–140), a runaway who is rarely at home (116; 220), Marko redoubles her father Mita in many respects. But since he is a peasant raised in the clan tradition of ius primae noctis (203–204), and was in the spirit of this tradition himself misused by his own father (210), Sofka is potentially not merely his daughter-in-law, or daughter for that matter, but also his ‘wife’ or mistress. This peculiar merger of roles that terrifies her, since she was raised in a milieu that drew clear social distinctions, only deepens her submissiveness. In fact, by bereaving his son of a wife (i.e. replacing wife with a second mother; 212–213, 224) Marko repeats Mita’s gesture of bereaving his daughter of a husband (i.e. replacing a husband with an immature son). But Sofka’s entrapment in these perverted reduplications, typical of the way in which the palanka punishes its dissidents, does not stop here. Having been abused by his father Marko in the same manner that the latter was by his own father, the son Tomča increasingly replaces his role as an immature child with that of a despotic father who bullies and beats Sofka (227, 234–235, 236–239). This vertiginous crisscrossing of the family and social scenarios into which Sofka and other figures are drawn, clearly follows from the historical, political, economic and social turbulences that Vranje underwent toward the end of the nineteenth century. The newly acknowledged Serbian state, opening itself toward the western wave of modernization, initiated the liberation of its serfs from their feudal relationship. Concomitantly, after having invaded Vranje, their ‘settler’ parvenu culture befell, contaminated, and violated the

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‘indigenous’ civilized one of the “old” Vranje in many respects.21 The peasants— at first shy, respectful (62–63), and unaccustomed to the citizens’ urban manners (92–93, 195)—bring along their new habits in clothing and behavior from abroad (i.e. Ottoman lands), their completely different music, dance and singing (195), their stocky and hairy bodies, hard and gnarly hands (196–197), and a growingly aggressive, unbridled, and lustful attitude toward the bride (201– 205). Next to all this, Sofka is disconcerted by the complete lack of privacy in their houses due to the hole in the roof (through which the daylight penetrates) (201, 221, 226, 244), as well as these houses’ scattered and messy distribution, which contrasts against the tidy urban quarters of Vranje (111, 186). However, the very core of their clan culture that most humiliates her is the despotic and greedy figure of the Primordial Father who lays claim to the bodies of all wives within the clan. Suddenly estranging that which was hitherto most familiar to her, the unexpected return of the suppressed ‘primitive’ societal modes induces a series of uncanny feelings in Sofka.22 But, as it were behind her back, the narrator indicates that the clan spirit, which Sofka’s family trusted to have definitely overcome proves to have been determining its representatives as well: Sofka’s great-grandfather haji Trifun is the epitome of the Primordial Father; her mother behaves fully unbridled in front of Marko (178); her relatives enter sexual alliances with the ‘Turks’ in the same way as Marko’s relatives do; she herself redoubles the tribally unbridled behavior of her ancestors and thus copies Marko’s ‘primitive’ transgression; her 21  Who exactly were here the ‘natives’ and who the ‘settlers’ remains disputable. The peasants’ pagan faith is of course older than the citizens’ Orthodox religion but from the citizens’ perspective it is ‘wild’ and ‘overcome.’ According to Dušan Bandić, the conflict between the paganism that glorifies the warlike violence as directed at the others (as epitomized by the folk hero Miloš Obilić), and Orthodox Christianity that glorifies the repenting violence as directed at oneself (as epitomized by the martyr King Lazar) underlies the Serbian culture from its early medieval times to the present (Bandić 55–63, 227–239). All victories of one system of belief over the other turned out to be provisional because violence against the others and against oneself, as we will come to see in the following, imply rather than exclude each other. 22  In his famous essay “The Uncanny”, Freud associates this notion with the unexpected survival of the supposedly surmounted mode of thinking or redoubling of the present in the past (“Das Unheimliche” 232). Although there is no traceable evidence of Stanković’s interest in psychoanalysis, it is not surprising that he is fascinated by the same “return of the repressed” as Freud because this phenomenon was, paradoxically, induced by the processes of modernization in various parts of late imperial Europe. Modernization moved Europe simultaneously forward and backward, though in different proportions and manifestations across its various parts.

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commuting father also mirrors Marko, since he flees Serbia to avoid shame like Marko flees ‘Turkey’ to avoid a vendetta; and finally, the whole triangular constellation of Sofka’s noble family (with the daughter as the third angle) turns out to be a mere inversion of her husband’s peasant family (with the son as the third angle), even more so if we consider the family servants as a fourth angle (female Magda vs. male Arsa) (Petković 118). What Sofka and hers are at constant pains to interpret as an irreconcilable opposition turns out to be a redoubling. Thus, through the invasion of Vranje by the settlers’ clan spirit, the palanka’s manner of dispossessing its members of their individuality is not eliminated but reinvigorated. To prove this thesis, let us compare the ritual bath before the wedding in the female part of the hamam on the occasion at which the palanka’s collective female body lays claim to Sofka’s individual body (chapter fifteen) with the wedding celebration in the groom’s house on the occasion at which the collective body of the peasant clan lays the same claim (chapters twenty-one, twenty-two and twenty-three). Both rituals demonstrate clear carnival traits. According to Bakhtin (Rabelais 303–368), in the course of the carnival festivities, the collective body dissolves the boundaries of individual bodies so that they merge into its emerging and measureless whole. The collective body’s in(con)clusiveness thus denies the individual bodies’ tendency toward isolation, separation and self-enclosure. As if to prove this, the narrator depicts the passage from home to the public bath as already being an exposure to the palanka’s mocking eyes that ‘dismember’ the observed bride, and compares this humiliation to the soldier’s passage through a flogging gauntlet (Nečista 96). But as soon as the girls take off their clothes, the door to collective licentiousness and debauchery is flung wide open. The girls’ initial rush, teasing, and screaming is, in the collective mood’s accelerated rise, replaced with joking, touching, groping, rubbing, biting, pinching, and the singing of obscene songs. These songs suggest that, with marriage, every woman sacrifices her body to the female collective body as placed at the service of the palanka’s male needs. Sofka realizes that her possession of her own body, as exemplified in various gentle ‘plays’ with it, is forever lost and bursts into inconsolable crying. As regards the other addressed collective scene, Sofka arrives at the groom’s house after the wedding ceremony in the church, and is suddenly surrounded by the peasant mob whose initial considerations quickly yield to unbridled behavior. Unchained, women begin to stroke her back, shoulders and hips, savoring their roundness (197). Having abandoned her noble citizen status, she has after all been equalized with them, which stimulates them to let their instincts run wild. Amidst a growingly uncontrollable laugh, giggle and squeak, pandemonium ensues, the overeaten and drunken peasants reject their clothes,

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making their bodies merge into a single body by caressing, kissing, embracing, squeezing, pinching and chasing one another around the house. “All men convert to the one male, all women in their turn to a general female” (202) comments the narrator as if invoking Bakhtin’s thesis of the folk’s collective body during the carnival festivities. He points out that the peasants organize their weddings periodically, “on predetermined days” on which the mob hermetically locks itself away from the outside world in order to be “more hidden and isolated”. In their orgies on such carnival occasions, so as to recover from the “powerfully restrained passions as deadened by their hard work”, the people “completely forget about themselves, proving unable to differentiate anything, distinguish anything, neither gender nor age nor years” (202–203). That is to say, in their unchained sexual intercourse they fully disregard if their partner is “old, young, wife, daughter-in-law, aunt or a relative” (202). Like in a tribe, they behave as if they were “all from one father and mother, from one house” in which the father lives with “all daughters-in-law” (203). The peasants’ collective body regresses to Freud’s “primal horde” from Totem and Taboo, the famous essay published only a couple of years after Stanković’s Impure Blood. The difference between the manner in which the palanka dispossesses Sofka’s body of individuality and the manner in which the peasants’ clan does the same is one of degrees rather than nature. As Konstantinović spells out in his philosophical investigation, the palanka and clan (rod) are historical derivations of the tribe. In my somewhat different interpretation, all three are compensatory ‘retroactive constructs’. The clan emerges as revenge against the palanka that dispossesses the peasants of dignity while the palanka in turn rises up in revenge against history that does the same to the periphery. Both the palanka and clan reply to their collective dispossession by passionately attaching themselves to it, by denying all attempts at their ‘cultivation,’ and by coercing their members to endorse this attachment. However, the clan reinvigorates this coercion. Sofka is compelled to transit from the palanka to the clan, which intensifies the pressure on her to give up her attempts at individual self-exemption. The first sign of her defeat is her readiness, after the disappointing conversation with her father, to sacrifice herself for the benefit of her family (127). However, this strategic ‘suicide’ still reckons with the outsmarting of the palanka’s expectations for her definite downfall by forcing this antagonist to admire her instead. That is to say, she once again tries to exempt herself from her catastrophe. The next sign is her moaning and weeping in the hamam, when she realizes that “everything is over”, her secret thoughts, hopes and dreams (159). The third signal that her life has ended is the wedding ceremony in the church during which Sofka is befallen by iterative feelings of darkness, coldness, lethargy, suffocation, and shuddering (182–183).

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Suddenly, confronted with the hopelessness of her position—in a characteristic turn that redoubles that of the palanka and the clan—she changes her attitude to her dispossession by starting to become attached to it. As soon as she transgresses from her familiar world to that of the peasant clan, she stops mourning her humiliation—the rape of a beauty from the tower, as she still imagines, by a wild horde that carries her along on its campaigns (195)—by starting to enjoy it. She suddenly immerses herself readily in her deepest humiliation, offering her body with great pleasure to the same Tomča whom she had previously abhorred (230–231). She even passionately licks the wounds inflicted to her by his violence and refuses to flee from him. Paradoxically, her suffering becomes a seldom privilege and the source of her pride. Giving herself over to solitude, alcohol, and the mute house servants who misuse her body, she sinks into an ever deeper self-mortification (238–240), exemplifying the peculiar way in which the palanka’s victims take revenge at their tormenter’s deadly mechanisms. “If I am the living dead, what can you do to me?” At first sight, the palanka reduces them to the condition of ‘bare life’ and ‘living dead’, i.e. the same condition of utter dispossession and degeneration to which it was doomed by history. As if drawing an analogy between the animal subsistence of both palanka and its victims, the narrator states: And nothing happened. Let alone the arrival of the death. Instead, the kids started to be born and to arrive. But what kind of children, what kind of childbirth! Only the firstborn child displayed some force and strength, while the others were ever paler and puffier. (240) At the very end, the narrator completely exempts himself from Sofka’s mortified consciousness, returning to the distant, condensed, and iterative mode of representation from the novel’s beginning. Parallel to him, and likewise completely detached from her previous exploring self, Sofka becomes an ordinary peasant woman, a skillful weaver both in the literal sense (she is described as weaving) and in the sense of her anonymous weaving of the palanka’s life fabric. While she had previously, by way of her uncontrollable thought stream, tangled the threads of this fabric, she is now called by her neighbors to unravel their entanglements, i.e. to deaden her thought by becoming “happy because of this unhappiness” (Konstantinović, Filosofija 41). Like the narrator who, in a curious resumption of her “happiness because of unhappiness”, accelerates his weaving of the palanka’s hearsay, she silently victimizes her rebellious individuality. After having finished this novel, even the author Borisav Stanković was for seventeen years, until the end of his life, dispossessed of his adventurous

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literary spirit. In the vocabulary of Karadžić’s aforementioned entry on “Cyril the Philosopher”, Sofka, the narrator and the author—none of them able to find an appropriate companion to form a new kind of community—“hanged themselves.” In Konstantinović’s vocabulary, the palanka’s spirit compelled them to exempt themselves from their individuality and to become “dead amidst life”, “saved through this death from all future temptations” (224). “The tribe kills Cyril the Philosopher always by his own hand” (209). Nonetheless, by replacing their active lives with a passive living-forth, they did not really surrender to the palanka’s all-engulfing determinism. In fact, the ‘living dead’ that come into being in such a way—and here I do not only mean Sofka, narrator and author, but also the novel itself in its mainstream interpretation— epitomize the self-exemptions from the palanka and thus, against the latter’s intention, the ferments of its upcoming opening and reconfiguration.

Janko Polić Kamov’s The Drained Swamp

While the enforced bride from the southern Serbian periphery is firmly riveted to her home(s), the prospective writer Arsen Toplak from the urban milieu of Zagreb is an extremely mobile person, both physically and intellectually.23 He is a typical Baudelairian flaneur. This follows of course from the different social positions of men and women in late imperial and post-imperial European societies but has other backgrounds too. To move from one place to the other, the male figures in Impure Blood regularly use horses. Arsen uses carriages, tramways, trains and ships thanks to the remarkable traffic network that was established in the last decades of the nineteenth century by the Dual Monarchy in its provinces.24 But in the first place he roams the crowded 23  According to the census from 1910, the Croatian capital Zagreb in which the novel’s first part takes place was about eight times bigger than Vranje, with the population of approximately 65 000 inhabitants. 24  Judson speaks about a revolution of communication and the expansion of transport infrastructures around 1880, which doubled the populations of imperial cities such as Prague, Zagreb, Lemberg, Czernowitz, Rijeka, Pula and Trieste (Judson, The Habsburg 333). In addition, he portrays the turn of the century as a period of huge migrations within and beyond the Dual Monarchy, which engendered a general feeling of deracination and disorientation. In fact, according to Schenk, the Monarchy constructed the railroad network to improve the military control of its borderlands, to foster their economic and cultural integration, and to avert them from switching to the other side but it failed to take into account its huge impact on the borderland societies and modes of perception that were confronted with a hitherto unimaginable and sometimes uncomfortable diversity.

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streets, markets, parks, the railway station, various corridors, stairwells, dining rooms, and salons, meets his friends in rented rooms, pubs, cafes, barber shops and pastry shops, visits churches, theatres and galleries, i.e. typical spaces of the urban ‘mass society’ whose cosmopolitan profiles were miles away from the palanka’s intimate and familiar abodes. With their accumulated memory, wide social and cultural resonance, and unknown passersby, they expose their visitors to a myriad of ongoing impressions as well as fluctuating, random and unexpected encounters, transforming them into vulnerable ‘inscription surfaces’. Not a family shelter but rootlessness is their basic life experience. Due to the established telephone, telegraph, postal, transportation, administrative, and public school services as well as the rapidly expanding media (Cohen 106; Judson, The Habsburg 335–336), modern Austro-Hungarians happened to be connected with distant events and beings better than with their new and/or unknown neighbors. Next to migrations within the country and abroad, their daily engagement in the Monarchy’s dense administrative and communicational network crossed national, linguistic and religious divisions in their minds. (Cohen 117) It coordinated their very heterogeneous desires, needs, and practices (Judson, The Habsburg 341), inducing dizziness and disorientation in the majority of the local population. Even outstanding individuals were not completely spared of them. Being located at the crossroads of many urban accidental and provisional communities and thus enmeshed in “multiple coexisting loyalties” (Cohen 117), Arsen’s self is permanently ‘beyond itself’, his identity constantly on the move. His ruined body is subjected to medical analysis, while his consciousness, delivered to accelerated external challenges, dissolves into disconnected reminiscences, sensations, and associations. Cut off from all abodes needed to collect and compose oneself, Kamov’s hero is engulfed by the modern world’s ‘atomic disaggregation’.25 This made the railways, through a significant inversion of their initial purpose, into the targets of violence and/or instruments of peripheral militant groups (Schenk). Since the centers and their peripheries interpreted and implemented the expansion of transport infrastructures differently, instead of eliminating the gap between them, the increased mobility merely reconfigured it. The railway connection between the harbor city of Rijeka (Fiume), in which Kamov was born, and the capital Zagreb (Agram), to which his family moved when he was seventeen (1902), was established in 1873. 25  According to Baudelaire’s famous essay “The Painter of the modern world” (1863), the first seismograph of this disaggregation was modern art, which did not hesitate to always reconfigure the decomposed past anew by departing from different presents. Following this thread, Nietzsche states in The Case Wagner (1888) that in modern art the world’s whole, due to the “anarchy of its atoms”, ceased to be an integrative factor. The word jumps out of the sentence, the sentence out of the page, the life resides no longer in the

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He decomposes not only internally but also externally, ceasing to be an integral part of his society. As regards his internal disintegration, the narrator describes Arsen’s individual memories as being “torn, dismembered, in fact pieces of the past” (Isušena kaljuža 67). Arsen himself interprets his “I” as a “blasted organism, a bunch of parts of a ruined whole,” which are now “each on its own, separated, atomized” (110). “This is why I am decomposing it: to make visible all its tiny screws and wheels …” (190). “I do not present the others,” he says at another place, “I write about myself. This will make the following appear incomplete and unfinished” (286). As regards the sudden alienation of the social whole, the houses that used to offer homes to their residents—remember Sofka—no longer fulfill this function. With their loose agglomeration of rented rooms and apartments, they strike their renters by their ominous strangeness: This whole house was like a secret, like a cry of the awakened dead. Signs of loneliness were inscribed in it like an unresolved echo … God knows how many people left their footsteps here, God knows how much crying, curses and black love accumulated within these walls that were blackened by the smoke … Something past, black, and disgusting was trembling around here … (35) Arsen’s identity is not solely bereft of the firm anchorage that is so characteristic of Sofka’s identity due to the delineated disaggregation of the modern world. As a typical hero of the modernist novel, he suffers from a chronic catarrh, which loosens his social obligations toward the others but increases those of the others toward him. Combined with his artistic ambitions, this illness engenders a peculiar relationship toward his family members, social and political affairs, art, and himself. “There is a bacillus in him … This illness isolates a man, removes him from society and commits him to him himself” (18). Intensified by continuous drinking, smoking, and starving it destroys his logical reasoning and concentration. “His thoughts were not harmonious, rounded and logical. […] He was not sufficiently settled and composed” (18). His bodily degeneration introduces a deep division into his self, the ‘material’ half of which is ill whereas the other ‘intellectual’ half draws inspiration for his poetry from this illness (16). This internal redoubling affects his relationships to his mother, brother, sister, brother-in-law, uncle and aunt by making whole (Nietzsche, Der Fall 27). Next to Baudelaire, he might have also read Paul Bourget’s Essays in Contemporary Psychology (1883), which insist on the necessity of separation of the individual life from the “social organism”, even at the price of the individual’s “complete solitude” (Bourget 24). Bourget was one of Kamov’s favorite authors.

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him, in the capacity of a material being, dependent on them while, in the capacity of an intellectual being, cynical toward and critical of them (19–20).26 Note that for Foucault (The Order 318), as far as the technologies of the self are concerned, modernity opens with the constitution of that which he calls “empirico-transcendental doublet”. From the end of the eighteenth century onward, the transcendental part was trying to get rid of its empirical restrictions but faced repeated failures. As opposed to Stanković’s narrator who portrays Sofka, despite all her efforts to the contrary, as blindly continuing her ancestry’s degeneration, Kamov’s narrator portrays the ‘degenerate’ Arsen at constant but futile pains to break with his ‘healthy’ hereditary ties. He does everything to ‘run wild’ since, for both him and the narrator, continuity is an illusion in both the ontogenetic and phylogenetic sense. Ontogenetically, the narrator concedes that “one thought grows from the other” but “without likening it”; phylogenetically, he stresses that “the son is different from the father” because “hereditary law” escapes definition (Isušena 18). Therefore, in a sharp contrast to the first chapters of Impure Blood, the narrator and the hero of The Drained Swamp withhold from the past the right to determine the present. This does not mean that the narrator identifies with the hero. Many critics of the novel have missed this point by identifying Arsen’s programmatic statements about literature with Kamov’s opinions or even his poetics in The Drained Swamp.27 If Arsen makes fun of his own illness, the narrator makes fun of the therapy he has envisaged for it, by calling his writing “scribblings” (15) and Arsen himself “a sort of a hack writer” (16). In other words, Arsen intended to artistically benefit from his own bodily illness but from the perspective of the narrator, who finds his writing ‘degenerate,’ he failed to do so.28 What is 26  He thinks about his mother, for example, that “she gave him life; she was the past. Now she was an obstacle to his life, destroying his present. Now she was superficial to him; in fact she meant nothing to him but he has not ceased meaning everything to her” (19). This stands in a direct opposition to Sofka’s commitment to her father. The same ambivalence characterizes Arsen’s relationship to his older brother-benefactor Julije who supports him and cares about him, but belongs to the camp of his ‘class enemies’ because he abuses his employees (19, 86–89). 27  For a critical review of this mainstream reception, see Brlek, who rightly points to a “significant distance” between the narrator and the hero (Brlek, “Ako je literatura” 160). 28  The modernist Künstlerroman, as a rule, takes a failed artist for its hero. An illustration might be Rainer Maria Rilke’s Malte Laurids Brigge (The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, 1910), who says that he “wanted to become a poet” but it “happened otherwise” and he became “a null”. As epitomized by its grounding father, Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness, the modernist novel is generally fascinated with the degeneration of cultivating designs, i.e. “draining the swamp”. See Childs 35–40.

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therefore displayed, paradoxically, is the narrator’s redoubling of Arsen’s failed exemption from his own self. The German sociologist Niklas Luhmann claims that this principle of a failed identity formation follows the guideline “I am what I am not” (“Individuum” 244). In everyday translation this amounts to “I am not that which the others want me to be” and in philosophical translation to “I negate the others’ negation of my own self”. Luhmann describes this “negation of negation” as “an unfinished and interminable process” of individualization, “an inherent infinity of striving and becoming” (215). The process is interminable because of the repeated setback of its agency into the dependence which it tries to escape. This aspect of the novel’s principle of structuration deserves closer inspection because, beyond Arsen and the narrator, it pertains to its author as well. Numerous intersections between Kamov’s biography and his hero’s experiences in the novel have already been noticed and recorded. For example, Arsen returns to his mother’s home after giving up his job as a commercial agent (Isušena 19), which Kamov himself did in 1906 when he started writing his novel; and Arsen’s mother is presented as a fresh widow, which Kamov’s mother at the time indeed was (his father died in 1905). Arsen is described as attending street demonstrations (29–31), a transgression for which Kamov himself paid with a three-month prison sentence. Arsen’s excessive alcohol and nicotine consumption, starvation and freezing (76–82) also match Kamov’s life experience, as does Arsen’s triangular anarchist circle (that he constitutes with his friends Marko and Nikšić) and his ambivalent relationship with his brother. However, what Kamov ironically redoubles in Arsen is not simply his own life but, much more subtly, his artistic dealing with it. In the same way that Arsen, the degenerate “hack writer,” tries to separate himself from his life experience, Kamov, the degenerate author, tries to separate himself from Arsen’s artistic experience. Kamov as the author intends to drain his former “swampy” artistic self through a critical re-description. However, the paradox that he must confront is that, while he ironizes Arsen’s artistic experience, he inadvertently repeats Arsen’s gesture of ironizing his own life experience. So he ultimately becomes involved with Arsen’s behavior instead of distancing himself from it. The modernist art’s cultivation of the past “swampy” experience amounts to an unintended entrapment within it. This paradox of striving to leave behind that which one is inadvertently heading toward, i.e. the ‘bottomless’ swamp, characterizes all relationships in the novel. Let me open the analysis at a basic level. Arsen himself is haunted by the repetition compulsion that subverts the envisaged emancipation of his consciousness. An exemplary instance of this is his embedded prose sketch on Adela and Emanuel (91–94), which responds to his previous experiences,

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dreams and ‘imaginary scenarios’.29 First of all, the name of Arsen’s fictional heroine, Adela, matches the name of his repeatedly addressed first sexual partner (67–68, 74, 94, 97, 159). Her importance in his life only stands in comparison to that of his younger sister Jelka who unexpectedly but constantly emerges in his obscene thoughts (23–25, 66, 95–96, 102), twice in a significant association with Adela (94, 97). This association accounts for a repeated dream that is reconstructed immediately before the prose sketch (90–91), in which a scenario reemerges from a previous, twice written but ripped up, and for the third time written sketch: he kills his brother-in-law and shamelessly copulates with his sister in the corner of a room. These reduplications indicate that Arsen is haunted by the past that he tries to come to terms with. Even this scandalous scenario (91) that violently penetrates his dream has its prehistory in a conversation conducted with his sister during the street demonstrations, in which he is befallen by the idea of murdering his brother-in-law (25). “He destroys her life, he is her burden, and I help her to cast off this burden” (66). This plan does not stop haunting him until it finds a way into the addressed dream. Hence Arsen’s ‘criminal’ scenario has its ‘dematerializing’ trajectory—from a real conversation, through the sudden idea, its iterative literary processing and de-processing, to a repeated dream—before it, hesitatingly, resurfaces in the fictional medium of his prose sketch on Adela and Emanuel. But before we unravel the plot of this sketch itself, it is worth noticing that Arsen’s scenario, despite its gradual dematerialization, does not culminate in this literary sketch but instead, through a characteristic turnaround, in a real event thereafter. After the narrator presented his sketch, Arsen visits his sister in her apartment and, as he retroactively comes to realize in a pub (because he lost consciousness in the sister’s apartment), attacks his brother-in-law with a chair. “And why I did not kill him, I do not know” (102). Thus, Arsen’s frenetically wandering scenario, an epitome of the Freudian ‘repetition compulsion,’ fails to materialize in reality. 29  Arsen’s other embedded prose sketch about the proprietress of a rented room and her daughter (63–65) also functions in the same way. It emerges equally compulsively and is recalled “I myself do not really know how” (62); and it equally responds to his random encounters and experiences with an anonymous flower girl, then the sockeye Mita, (56–57) then a girl with the basket (58–60) and tobacconist (62) along with his obsessions with his sister and a maidservant from the corridor (62, 66). Both sketches therefore function as a sort of unintended ‘hall of echoes’. In the following, I will argue that the whole plot of this novel functions in the same resonant way, characteristic of the repetition compulsion. Like the sketches as its partes pro toto, the plot loosens its constituents from their strict teleological function by making them undecidedly oscillate between their multiple coexisting loyalties.

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In a certain sense, it materializes instead in the fictional sketch within which Emanuel, as Arsen’s Doppelgänger, manages to kill his mistress Adela’s husband. The reader learns this, again, very indirectly. Within this embedded sketch, Emanuel communicates to Adela the reason for his long absence: he was working on a study about a man who “victimizes himself for general interests”. From his reconstruction of this study—embedded within Arsen’s embedded sketch—Adela learns that this man suddenly changed his orientation, “got involved with a married woman and killed her husband out of jealousy” (93). Adela’s scream after Emanuel finishes his narrative indicates that she, endorsed in her anxious conjectures by her lover’s bewildered outlook and behavior, translated the fictional triangle from his presented study into the ‘real’ triangle between her, Emanuel and her husband. In the same way, as external readers of Arsen’s sketch (redoubling Adela as the internal listener to Emanuel’s sketch), we are expected to translate Adela’s ‘real’ triangle into Arsen’s ‘real’ one. Thus, the reality that the reader of this novel has to ultimately deal with transforms into an uncanny hall of echoes. They mysteriously hover not only spatially, i.e. between the different levels of materiality/fictionality, but also temporally, i.e. between the anticipating events, plans and dreams that make the things and affairs appear déjà vu, and the retroactive recollections and narratives that make them appear après coup. In the continuously, multiply refracted fictional world of The Drained Swamp, the vertiginous latency swallows up all that the everyday world is at pains to make distinct.30 I take this to be a result of its both spatially and temporally liminal position, an overlapping of its in-betweens as elaborated above.

30  The novel teems with dreams, daydreams, extensive recollections of past traumatic experiences (67–73, 76–82, 156–159, 222–248), fantasies, and hallucinatory states as induced by illness, freezing, starvation, alcohol, and nicotine; it does so to an extent which makes it impossible to clearly distinguish between its diegetic levels. The ‘dream cascades’ in which the hero, instead of awakening into reality, repeatedly awakens into another dream are especially intriguing (150–151). In sum, the novel’s plot unfolds as a ‘hall of echoes’, a persistent in-between of déjà vu and après coup, haunted by nesting resonances which by their vibration tear apart its logical disposition. In this sense of being ‘unable’ to integrate itself, its whole disaggregates like Arsen himself who compares his self with a “shattered and rutted building” (162–63). In an essay composed at the time when Kamov wrote his novel (1906), Hofmannsthal describes his epoch as an “ambiguous, indeterminate, and slippery” age in which a “chronic dizziness vibrates”. Whereas previous generations trusted the firm things and values, the people’s “souls” are now on a feverish search for something that hovers between the phenomena and connects them with the wide unknown world (“Der Dichter” 60–62).

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The vibration of this latency, which saturates its world with what Musil dubbed “the sense of the possible” does not accept limits. That is to say, there are further possible, and very important, echoes to be detected in the embedded sketch. Emanuel does not profile his hero by pure chance as a man determined to victimize himself for general interests. True, he changes this life design because he realizes that people do not really adore such ‘fools’ but rather, although hideously, the ‘smart’ outlaws and adulterers. But while Emanuel opposes life designs that sacrifice their carriers by preferring those that sacrifice the antagonists—and while he understands these two designs as an alternative—Arsen merges them into a complex and inclusive life orientation, which he formulates as “a compassion for a human being and a terror for society” (154). For Arsen, it is by eliminating the representatives of society (as epitomized by his brother-in-law) that one displays compassion for individuals as their victims (as epitomized by his sister)! By killing his brother-in-law, as the representative of an unjust society, Arsen wishes to eliminate the oppression from it. In his understanding, his crime against the society serves the liberation of innumerous individuals who are exposed to this society’s oppression. Next to all aforementioned reduplications of the past events, experiences and imaginary scenarios, it is this fundamental intention of “victimizing for general interests” that, surreptitiously, finds its expression in Arsen’s prose sketch. In the Dual Monarchy at the turn of the century, these “general interests” primarily referred to two kinds of mass victims: women and workers. Both movements took advantage of the rituals of mass mobilization, which arose with the populist political practices that were enabled by the heightened democratic consciousness of the time (Schorske 116–180). In the borderlands, not only local national elites but “[m]en and women from lower-middle and working-class backgrounds, who were educated by the liberal school system, had learned their lessons” (Judson, The Habsburg 351). They wanted to become active citizens by founding workers’ organizations and feminist groups (360). In his youth an enflamed nationalist on the model of his father, the grownup Kamov, now rebelling against this paternal model31 and powerfully taken by the political turbulences of imperial peripheries, shifted his focus to social stakes,32 which came to particular expression in the novel’s first part “At the 31  The ambivalence of this rebellion comes to expression both in the novel itself (226–231) and in Kamov’s novella Freedom, which describes the illness and death of the protagonist’s father. (Pobunjeni pjesnik 142–166). 32  According to Ivan Berend, the distinctive characteristics of the East-Central European region was a complete confusion of national, social and economic stakes as enabled by the rising populist politics (Berend 83, 201).

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Bottom”.33 Therein, next to being a merciless self-examiner, Arsen acts as an enflamed savior of the oppressed, in the first place women and workers. In his view, not only are wives their husbands’ victims (as epitomized by both of Arsen’s sisters: the deceased older one “was lying stretched out with the murdered youth and angry lips” (Isušena 54) and the younger Jelka’s husband “disfigures her life” (66)) but all women suffer under men: The male brain does not get hurt today: it rules. The female brain gets hurt today—it is a proletarian that rises against the bourgeoisie. […] You [women] display pain, persecution, and lawlessness. […] You are beaten by stupidity, ignorance, and whips. This is a disgusting whip: for slaves. (133) Next to women, the employees are also victims of their bosses who force them into humiliating mechanical labor, such as writing thousands of addresses on the letters for the firm’s clients.34 As Arsen’s friend Marko observes: “Mortified existences, but above all mortified intellects” (41). In numerous reflections during the first part of the novel, Arsen also critically targets clerks, brothel owners, professors and priests, taken to be odious representatives of an unjust society. Deeply embittered by it, he repeatedly flirts with anarchist activism.35 Nevertheless, in a typical critical self-redoubling, the novel’s narrator, as his alter ego (or the dislocated transcendental part of his “empirico-transcendental doublet”), remains detached and ironizes his hate against the oppressors and the advocacy of abused women:

33   The Drained Swamp consists of three parts, titled “At the Bottom” (itself consisting of two untitled sections), “In the Width”, and “To the Height”, from which only the first is narrated by an impersonal narrator, the second and the third parts being narrated by the protagonist Arsen himself. However, even if Kamov introduces the first person narrative, the gap between the I who experiences and the I who narrates about this experiencing “I” (that in its turn epitomizes Foucault’s “empirico-transcendental doublet”) remains unresolved, as we will come to see. 34  There are two such episodes in the novel which, as usual, perturb one another, as the victim in the first is Arsen’s friend Marko and the tormenter in the second is Arsen’s brother Julije (39–42, 86–89). 35  Time and again, for instance, he ponders upon throwing a bomb into the crowd (29, 97, 154), gets stigmatized as an anarchist (40) and bespeaks the fascinating power of anarchy (154–55).

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His anger became absurdly unfair […] so that a woman that was probably illiterate or ended her education at primary school was raised to be the representative of women’s emancipation. (31) As he matures—the exemplary plot of the Künstlerroman as the Bildungsroman’s modernist derivative—Arsen gradually distances himself from his youthful rage. More accurately, the author transfers the narrator’s external distancing from Arsen to an internal distancing of the ‘transcendental’ Arsen (as narrator) from the ‘empirical’ Arsen (as protagonist). Whereas in the novel’s first part Arsen was obsessed with the street demonstrations, toward the end of the first part and in the second part he realizes that the objective of such demonstrations is to “beat the detective by leaving the ‘professor’ alone” (165) and that such manifestations, as a rule, “by berating the clergy’s dirtiness, want to cloak their own” (217). He is now convinced that one fanaticism cannot be eliminated by means of another, such as the anarchist violence directed at the “centers of power” (221). Realizing that violence might have become an internal part of his self, he instead undertakes its sublimation. His ‘psychic swamp,’ the ‘bottom’ of which he had radically excavated both empirically and reflectively in the first part, undergoes a process of ‘draining’ in the remaining parts. What the novel’s title is accordingly hinting at is Arsen’s intellectual maturing until he becomes a proper artist, so to say, Kamov himself, who ultimately authors the novel. However, is such a full emancipation possible if, from the novel’s very outset, Arsen’s empirical and transcendental self (in his capacity as the protagonist and as the narrator) both enable and disable each other? On the one hand, the deeper his body had disintegrated, the higher his individual intellect had fled. On the other hand, his ill body, in its turn, manages to smuggle its degeneration into his intellectual insights. Since the process of individualization thus amounted to an interminable litigation between the empirical and transcendental part of the self—“I am what I am not”—no ultimate bottom of the self’s ‘swamp’ was available and no real cultivation of it possible. The self turns out to be an “abyss”, the bottom of which appears “lost in the murky depths” and can only be inspected through the “overthrowing” of the researcher himself/ herself into it (74, 98). What makes it so bottomless, is the steady resurgence of an unprocessed ‘residue’ that requires a further processing.36 36  This is, after all, the same indeterminate ‘residue’—the ‘soul’—that preoccupies Musil a good decade thereafter in “A sort of introduction” to his Man without Qualities. His narrator therein states that next to nine identities attributed to “every dweller on earth” by their internally diversified societies, there is a tenth attribute, which is “difficult to describe,”

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To give an illustration, as soon as the medical analysis of his sputum confirmed his tuberculous infection, Arsen “sensed the new much more intensely” (19). Such feverish states nourish his artistic inspiration by driving him to the significant conclusion that “the weaker one is, the stronger one is” (28). “For exactly now he worked a lot and, it seemed to him, comprehended everything more easily and judged more swiftly. Never before was he in possession of such a richness of thoughts and words” (28). Nonetheless, like the narrator-protagonist of Nietzsche’s Ecce homo before him,37 for such a heightened judgmental capability he pays the price of a terrible bodily exposure: The people struck him, their flesh and blood, the life of millions, all mankind struck him. He went down the street in such feelings, sensing something new that came from a deep, black, abysmal distance. […] All that struck him like tireless, endless waves. And something unknown, deep, black and abysmal resided in him, in his life, organism and brain. (32) Arsen’s ‘scribbling’ thus draws its ultimate stimulus from the ‘naturalist’ obsession with the mud and the stench of the social, family and individual ‘swamps’. This is why in his view “ ‘naturalism’ beat ‘idealism’ like coitus the versified love” (84). The so-called decent citizens use to divert their attention from such indistinct residues of civil value distinctions but he is, in the novel’s first part, firmly convinced that literature can only survive if it openly and bravely faces them. All literature is boring if bereft of crooks, madmen and criminals. The life is interesting if lived by people, and people if they belong to psychopathology. Psychology begins where health ends! (155) Despite the mainstream reception of Kamov’s novel, Kamov as the author tends to leave behind such ‘firmly convinced’ statements as those of his hero. “merely an empty, invisible space with reality standing in the middle of it like a little toy brick town, abandoned by the imagination” (Musil 34). But since this attribute that eludes to imagination absorbs into its emptiness all the remaining determinable identity attributes, “every dweller on earth” ultimately becomes a “man without qualities,” which subjects his or her multiple coexisting loyalties to an interminable reconfiguration rather than accomplishing any final integration. 37  In this work Nietzsche describes the feverish condition in which he composed his Dawn, stating that the light, brightness and clarity of his mind that characterize its emergence were enabled by a three-day headache as accompanied by a dreadful expectoration of manure (Ecce homo 265).

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This is the right moment to raise an examination of the aforementioned allpervading paradox of the novel—striving to leave behind that which one is inadvertently heading toward—from the protagonist to the authorial level. Although Kamov, as a typically modernist writer, flirts with naturalism in the same way as the modernist Stanković does, neither The Drained Swamp nor Impure Blood exemplify the victory of an aesthetics of the ugly over an aesthetics of the beautiful. Such a straightforward triumph of the ‘swamp’ of the low social strata over the culture of the high strata would imply a simple negation, whereas Kamov, as the theoretical anarchist, as we have seen, prefers the double one. Rather than just excavating the ‘reverse side’ of the (petty) bourgeois image of reality, he lays bare, in a more refined artistic way, the impossibility of reality’s representation. He does not trust that the true reality will appear as soon as one destroys the false one, because the real withdraws itself by definition.38 In Kamov’s poetics, as I interpret it, literature has the task of problematizing all representations of reality in the name of this residue, the real, which they cannot process. For this sake, his novel sets in motion that which Julia Kristeva, in her investigation of modernist literature, described as the litigation of a ceaseless negation (La révolution 416).39 In this regard Kamov’s technology of self-fashioning, again, corresponds with Nietzsche’s. In his last and unfinished work Ecce homo (1888–89) the German philosopher addresses his “purity drive,” which replaces straightforward human compassion (i.e. the 38  Here, I am deliberately alluding to Lacan’s concept of le réel, since it also relies on Hegelian double negation. In his XX seminar (Encore, from 1972–73) Lacan admires Buňuel’s sentence “Thank God, I’m an atheist!” by claiming that strict atheists are covert clericals. Stavrakakis explains: “In order to create a distance from crude reduction it is necessary […] to reduce reduction to its own impossibility” (Stavrakakis 142). 39  Putting such a demand on literature, Kamov sublimes the anarchist terrorist activism as represented by Arsen in the novel’s first part into an interminable intellectual operation. In fact, as we will see, the second and third parts of the novel pave the way for such ethical postponement, which rejects both a fascination with the beautiful and a horror at the ugly, searching for the sublime as located at the risky border between the two. (For this decisive point, a juncture of the fascination and horror in the tradition of the aesthetics of the sublime, see Matuschek.) Already Kristeva noticed that this operation of a ceaseless negation corresponds with anarchism more than with any other political movement (La révolution 421). For the poststructuralist strategy of exposing value oppositions to a continuous self-destruction or the condition of a permanent catastrophe, see Connor 12. For a philosophical investigation of the connection between poststructuralism and anarchism, see May. He too interprets Hegelian double negation as anarchism’s key objective (62).

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moralist siding) with a cautious self-exemption from such compassion (i.e. reflective ethics). “My humanity amounts to a continuous self-overcoming [of its inhumanity]” (Ecce homo 276). As if demonstrating such tireless ethical meandering, Kamov’s narrator subtly parenthesizes Arsen’s passionate siding with the naturalist laides-lettres against the realist belles-lettres by letting him make such ‘programmatic’ statements in an overexcited state of starvation (in the first case) or erotic fervor heated by rum and nicotine (in the second case) (Isušena 126–127). Exhaustion and unaccountability thus discretely derogate Arsen’s artistic ‘manifests’. Following this surreptitiously subversive design, in the second and third parts of the novel, which are narrated in the first person, Kamov transfers the narrator’s ironizing of Arsen’s personal unreliability to Arsen’s own ironizing of his narrative unreliability. In such a way, he makes Arsen-as-narrator gradually acquire a quasi-authorial competence. “Quasi” because even in the capacity of a retroactive narrator he cannot get rid of his former empirical self, which obstinately returns to his narrative by disarraying its sovereign flow. Like Rilke’s contemporaneous protagonist Malte Laurids Brigge,40 he incessantly doubts the accuracy of his statements, confuses his chronology and admits self-delusion as well as the discontinuity of his life and writing (189, 229, 247, 257, 259, 272). Thus the process of his maturing into an ‘artist proper’ does not so much entail a definite cultivating of his ‘wildness’ as an unraveling of his painstaking coming to terms with it. Far from being forever eliminated, the division within his “empirico-transcendental doublet” undergoes a reconfiguration. Arsen, for his part, intends to transform the technology of his self-fashioning from a compulsive redoubling of his life experiences into a relaxed resumption of his artistic experiences. This is already suggested in the titles of the second and third parts: “In the Width” and “To the Height.” They replace the irritated elimination of family inheritance from his abysmal psyche41 with this psyche’s attentive extension toward the ethnic and cultural others and the concomitant translation of its empirical into transcendental stakes.

40  Rilke’s novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, to recall, was written at the same time as Kamov’s. Malte, for his part a failed writer, also incessantly calls into doubt his statements by repeating “I don’t know if I have already said”, “Will the people believe me”, “What I am speaking is wrong”, or “I swear”. 41  In a pub conversation with his friends, Arsen suddenly confesses: “How many times have I wished to be an illegitimate child, to be bereft of hereditary law! This law pressures me with its antipathy! I’d wish to come from a murky source, free of all connections, to have a past as black as a soul” (38).

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How does this intended transformation of his self-fashioning unfold? At the start of the first part of the novel, when he frenetically strolls through Zagreb, a myriad of chaotic and accelerated impressions created by the mass of random encounters invade his consciousness, transforming it into a site of unpredictable and explosive reactions or whimsical associations. … without really knowing how, he recalled that girl […] But, from that point on, his thoughts started to transform into something completely different, randomly touching upon his sister, and by passing her started to accumulate around the tobacconist. This could be compared with a dozing passenger who suddenly reaches his station and, without wondering or reflecting about his trajectory, takes his luggage and jumps off the train. (62) But in the novel’s second part not only Arsen’s associations hurriedly travel in various directions, jumping from one optic to the other and suddenly changing perspectives in a world that became plural and multifocal through a communicational uniting of its differences. At one place he states: “And I could prove so many things that contest each other, and all this would be true—for it is as if the truth can only be contested by the truth” (247). Such a world, as Nietzsche remarks, faces its inhabitants with a steady “turnaround of perspectives”, which he gradually learned to master (Der Fall 37). In order to accomplish the same mastery—since he is confused by how nobody at his home addresses adultery while his friends never fail to address it (Isušena 84–85)—Arsen undertakes a number of journeys in the second and third parts of the novel. Already in the second section of the first part, we meet him in Venice visiting libraries, churches and galleries, i.e. archives of a completely different kind of memory than Zagreb’s streets, parks and pubs, where he accordingly discusses art instead of the daily politics. He reads and learns, practicing a much more comfortable and healthier way of life bereft of the revolutionary designs that were typical of the turbulent late imperial peripheries. As opposed to his former group-based wildness that was connected with his anarchist-activist inclinations, his wildness now acquires a more distinctive, individual profile.42 But it is only an intense consumption of various railways and shipways through Italy 42  According to Miroslav Hroch, members of the so-called dominant nations had individualized themselves almost spontaneously by joining the process of their nations’ selfdifferentiating evolutions. The members of the so-called inferior nations, by contrast, were confronted with an uneasy choice: either to join their nations’ dominant collective identity or the dominant nations’ individual identities, an option that would often have

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and France, combined with regular visits to cafes, barber and pastry shops, churches, libraries and theatres that enables the transformation of his consciousness from a vulnerable and explosive ‘inscription surface’ into a relaxed agency of accumulated heterogeneous impressions. To sum it up, whereas in “At the Bottom” Arsen is a mobile flaneur of an increasingly dependent and invaded imagination, in the following parts he becomes an immobile traveler of an increasingly free and invasive imagination. Besides, as a flaneur he is doomed to a restricted peripheral space (Zagreb, Rijeka) whereas as a traveler he traverses a huge variety of South-European cities (Venice, Rome, Florence, Milan, Turin, Genoa, Marseille, Naples), which are provided with a vibrant historical and cultural memory and thus systematically extend his intellectual horizon. As a result, he turns from a “poet” into a “narrator,” by “cooling down” his former fanaticism (222). Not only does he throw away his former life as a “fool or delinquent,” characterized by the wild “outbursts” of his young temper, but, more importantly, he gives up “poetry,” i.e. poīesis that is ruled by inspiration, in favor of “epic,” i.e. tēkhnē, that is governed by skill. But does he really? For as soon as he launches his new epic attitude by chronologically ordering and systematically reconstructing his school time, in order to show that he governs himself and commands the topic in a sovereign manner, he notices that he failed to emancipate himself from his past fallacies: “But I am mistaken; this must belong to my immaturity; it just slipped out and I confused the chronology” (229). Or, a little bit later: “The memory leaves me… I will not make it! I will not live long enough” (232). He cannot become a true epic narrator because he “smokes a cigarette after every tenth line” and his “pen goes too swiftly over the sheet of paper” (232). His economic shortage re-entraps him, returning him to “poetry” because, disarrayed and excited as he is, he cannot “compose” his nerves (242–243). Thus his plan to become the sovereign narrator of his life fails. Even if he moved closer to the relaxed imperial center which dispossesses its subjects of their local dependencies, this center did not dispossess the ‘wild’ intruder of his debts to the periphery. On the contrary, it made them painfully aware. This “return of the repressed” makes Arsen reorient and reinvigorate his self-exemption by directing it, in the final part of the novel, “to the height,” i.e. beyond the reach of the blinded humans and their social and psychic ‘swamps.’ Nothing suits this purpose better than the ship that leaves behind the bumpy and crooked movement on the uneven earthen surface in order to slowly glide on the smooth water of the open sea. In his Gay Wisdom, Nietzsche addresses to take into account various social sanctions at their home (Hroch 10). As typical dissident figures, Arsen and Sofka obviously side with the second option.

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the open sea in the same paragraph in which he announces the death of god (§ 343). After god’s departure, the enchanting dawn of humankind begins by inviting the philosophers, the carriers of its “free spirit” to embark their ships and break free (§ 289). Arsen becomes such a philosopher. However, they are only expected to liberate themselves in their minds, sacrificing the freedom of their bodies. Accordingly, on his ship to Venice, Arsen incessantly repeats that he is not even moving but nonetheless advances (Isušena 323, 352, 353). “This is how I should always advance, without ever moving. To depart everywhere without moving anywhere” (352). How this mobilization of one’s mind through the mortifying of one’s body is to be understood becomes clearer when he launches a new imperative in which the ship is substituted for a hot air balloon: “To create a balloon and to fly through the cosmos […] to get out of everything; to lose the ground under your feet” (352–353). The price of such a full self-emancipation is an extreme self-dispossession. For his last voyage by ship from Marseille to Naples, Arsen booked a third class cabin due to his notorious financial shortage. Yet, after he gave up his “country, company, habits, convictions, upbringing, and life,” and remained “without hopes, without wishes, without goals,” the allegations and insults coming from other travelers do not have a bearing upon him in the slightest (352–353). To recall Sofka: “If I am the living dead, what can you do to me?” Having “got out of everything,” he becomes firmly attached to his dispossession and indifferently levitates in the air like a “ghost” (252–253). If he “is where he is not” (252), then he acquires divine attributes which prevent people from hurting him: “My soul plunges into god and god sinks into me” (252). Not everybody can levitate freely: There is always ground under our feet. Half of all people leave their birthplace; a third their circle; a quarter their convictions; a fifth their upbringing; a sixth their habits; a seventh their life … And nobody, nobody leaves his or her character and temperament, and all, all, all people keep the ground under their feet. (352) All—with the single exception of him who wants solely “nothingness /Ništa/” (354). This nothingness that a fully dematerialized Arsen identifies with— “rather than wanting nothing, man even wants nothingness” (Nichts; Nietzsche, Zur Genealogie 412)—offers the key to understanding his self-formation. It goes back to Lacan’s le réel which withdraws itself from any representation, Luhmann’s “I am what I am not” which exempts the individual from all identity attributions, or Musil’s “indeterminable attribute” for that matter, which absorbs into its emptiness all the remaining identity loyalties. Arsen indeed

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enlists earthly loyalties that he has got rid of by passionately attaching himself to this nothingness: “my homeland, my upbringing, my life, my character, my temperament, my idea, my will, and my power” (Isušena 354). But he has certainly not renounced them in vain because “weakness is my power and apathy my will” (355). The nothingness that he identifies with confers on him the precious ability of self-exemption that, on the one hand, testifies to a radical self-dispossession43 and, on the other hand, operates as a ferment of an all-encompassing revolutionizing of the world.44 His messianic powerlessness thus clandestinely acquires the attributes of power. Recall that Arsen in the first part of the novel endeavors to empty his abysmal psyche out to the very bottom in order to get rid of all hereditary dependencies. In the second part, Arsen seemed to have left behind this obsession with becoming his own father but at the end the same feverish preoccupation catches him in an even more ambitious form. Having meanwhile acquired through reading and learning the ability to dispossess himself of all restricting loyalties, his mind accomplishes godlike qualities such as silence, tranquility and indifference. “Smile is my question and my answer. […] Thus people can think whatever they want about me, but they can know nothing” (354). He turns his human catastrophe into a privilege by becoming his own god, i.e. a sort of sage in possession of full self-control. With the perfection of a mirror, though, this elevation into the divine heaven reflects his initial revolutionary design of excavating his animal depths: “To overthrow oneself into the—heaven? […] Why can we not fall—upwards?” (353). Two seemingly opposite designs mirror each other inasmuch as they have one and the same objective: the absolute sovereignty of the self. However, does this design not exemplify wildness? In a word, Kamov’s technology of self-authoring in The Drained Swamp does not betray his anarchist program but only redirects it into a complete selfsublimation. Insisting on a radical dematerialization as the only appropriate path to the ultimate self-possession, this program undergoes a development from an immediate group activism to a postponed formation of individuality. The wildman evolves from a provincial terrorist who has to be socially disciplined into an urban artist who systematically parenthesizes all his communal loyalties. He renounces these all-too-human dependencies in order to identify 43  Arsen repeatedly states that he has “got out of everything” and “is not what he is” (353–355). 44  Recall the famous verse of The International: “We have been naught, we shall be all”. Instead of disappearing, the underlying logic that this “all” can only be accomplished via “naught”, which determines Arsen’s activist life design in the first part of the novel, subtly reemerges in the third part, on the level of his self-formation.

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foreclosed possibilities and restore the neglected itineraries of his unbearable geopolitical and historical present. Parallel to that, on the basis of ‘elective affinities,’ he establishes an imagined community of such presents’ outsiders and dissidents. After all, nobody is better qualified to forge transhistorical and transcultural alliances than an inhabitant of a geopolitical and historical inbetween. Connecting with Nietzsche’s technologies of self-fashioning as well as harmonizing itself with Rilke’s, Hofmannsthal’s and Musil’s roughly contemporaneous technologies, Kamov’s shaping of Arsen’s and his own self also anticipates, in a novelistic form, Lacan’s interpretation of subject formation, Luhmann’s sociology of modern individuality and, for that matter, Foucault’s ethics of self-authoring. To underpin this comparison with Foucault, in much the same way that Kamov engages the unprocessed residue of identification to persistently disaggregate Arsen’s selves, Foucault lets the residue that hovers “outside everything visible and everything invisible” (Blanchot, The Infinite 256) repeatedly interrogate the symbolic order. In Blanchot’s interpretation, he found an in-different remainder which continuously sets a new horizon for the symbolic operations of differentiations powerfully appealing (199). A “man always on the move”, Foucault toyed “with the thought that he might have been, had fate so decided […] nothing or nobody in particular” (un je ne sais quoi ou un je ne sais qui; Blanchot, Michel Foucault 17). It was in the name of the unfathomable potential of this je ne sais quoi that he was ready to let his thought pass “through what is called madness,” to “withdraw from itself, turn away from a mediating and patient labor […] towards a searching that is distracted and astray […] without result and without works” (The Infinite 199). This uncompromised unworking of Foucault’s self as undertaken in the name of this ambiguous and “swampy” je ne sais quoi not only displays the same characteristics but also the same radicalness as that of Kamov. In sum, however refined a form this self-sublimation into a ‘living ghost’ takes, it resumes the same ‘wildness’ that it proclaims to be directed against. The indistinct character of the late imperial periphery—an epitome of the ‘zone of indeterminacy’ (Agamben, The Open 37)—strikes back where nobody expects it, amidst the modernist self as the most distinct accomplishment of imperial centers. But the same holds vice versa. For their part, by assuming such an eminently modernist shape, the disempowered peripheral selves seem to have activated the same harshly disciplining operations which they were determined to deactivate. By striving to discipline the other’s wildness, both the center and the periphery ultimately turn wild.

Chapter 3

A Rebellion on the Knees: Miroslav Krleža and the Croatian Narrative of Dispossession Introduction Miroslav Krleža is one of the few canonical writers of modern Croatian and Yugoslav literature(s). Although his work was the subject of many controversies both during and after his lifetime, today few would deny that it set the standard for modernist literature throughout the entire South Slavic cultural space. Krleža modernized almost every literary genre, from poetry, drama, the novella, the novel, the essay, polemics and the diary to ‘encyclopedic prose’, both in terms of structure and content. At the same time he had a keen interest in science, philosophy and painting, quite in the spirit of the intellectual and artistic versatility of the cultural milieu of the Viennese fin de siècle (Janik and Toulmin 21–22, 119–21),1 which had a decisive impact on his work. Moreover, he 1  Nietzsche can be interpreted as a multifaceted talent, as is the case in Sloterdijk (1986), for instance. When Sloterdijk entitles the first chapter of his book “Centauric Literature”, he is alluding to a passage from a letter of Nietzsche’s: “Scholarship, art and philosophy are growing inside me to such an extent that one day I’m bound to give birth to centaurs”. Sloterdijk (Thinker 28–34) sees in this an elective affinity with Richard Wagner, the “rhetorician as a musician” on whom Nietzsche launched a polemical attack. It is hardly surprising then that Nietzsche’s peculiar aphoristic style left its mark on the works of Karl Kraus and Ludwig Wittgenstein (Gellner 107). Hermann Broch (Hugo von Hofmannsthal 55) considered the efforts of the fin de siècle to combine several art forms after the model of the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk to derive from the vacuum of cultural values that existed in Vienna around the turn of the century: “[…] the more complete the vacuum, the more the various ‘partial revolutions’—as they simultaneously sharpen their tendencies—will converge in their struggle to become a single, all-encompassing revolution”. In contrast, the vacuum of cultural values in East Central Europe which decisively shaped Krleža’s radical revolutionary ideology with its tendency to merge everything was a product of the backward social, administrative and economic state infrastructure of the newly formed post-imperial states (Berend 48–83), as we will consider in greater detail below. In order to combat this vacuum produced by the collapse of imperial values, the intellectuals of the imperial successor states logically thought they had to solve what were considered the great questions of humanity, while the intellectuals in the newly formed nation states thought it their duty to solve their great national question (Hának xvi–xvii). However, the differences between the generous liberal and narrow-minded nationalist motivations for these respective efforts—neither of which were,

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shared with his Austrian contemporaries the unique experience of living in a series of political end times that ultimately refused to end. While the Austrian intellectuals born at the turn of the century were forced to experience the fall of the Dual Monarchy, the First Republic, the Ständestaat and, as part of the Third Reich, the Ostmark (Menasse 10, 17), Krleža was confronted with the collapse of the Dual Monarchy, the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and the independent Croatian state. He did not have to live through the disintegration of socialist Yugoslavia however. In contrast to his Western colleagues, who reacted to this typically East-Central European political turbulence with distrust of any kind of clear-cut identity (17) or by withdrawing into art (Magris 184; Janik and Toulmin 59), Krleža developed an unparalleled passionate interest in the politics of the day in almost each of the five state systems in which he lived. But by no means was his intellectual energy exhausted: with a command of the largest European languages, he had first-hand knowledge of their literatures and cultures. He might thus be considered to belong to that truly encyclopedic type of belated Enlightenment figure characteristic of East-Central European cultural circles. As in the case of Voltaire, for example, the range of his oeuvre and the intensity of his discourse overshadowed his individual literary works, although they do include some masterpieces. And just like the figure of Voltaire in the French literary and cultural space, the figure of Krleža has cast a long shadow over its South Slavic counterpart. His intellectually and politically engaged, almost caustic discourse in the manner of a Karl Kraus, forcing his readership to either passionately take sides with him or to simply dismiss him, has had a strong influence on the reception of his work. No matter whether Krleža’s texts elicited enthusiasm or rancor, this aspect of his discourse has meant the complexity of his argumentation has been subjected to crudely reductive readings. One of the most striking examples of such one-sided reception is the curious silence regarding his almost life-long obsession with the Croatian national question—both in the Yugoslav and the subsequent Croatian phase of his reception. His Yugoslav contemporaries probably suppressed this obsession because nationalist passion was simply unbefitting for a recognized Yugoslav writer; later Croatian critics probably overlooked it because an author with “proletarian” nationalist sentiments did not correspond to the (petty) bourgeois construction of Croatianness of the newly defined Croatian literary canon. It is only recently that Zoran Kravar has corrected this long-standing injustice, stressing that it should be noted, the choices of the intellectuals themselves—meant that their artistic hybridity and diversity were characterized not only by different directions, but also by different aesthetic values (Gellner 34).

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Krleža was concerned with the national question his whole life, to an extent that far surpasses the interest of other Croatian writers and intellectuals in the national problem. In various periods of his career he wrote essays and treatises we can consider significant contributions to the discussion of the national question. Additionally, his obsession with obvious problems of the Croatian people as well as other South Slavs, particularly Serbs, also finds expression in his literary works, and influenced many of his life decisions and cultural initiatives. Kravar2



Croatia as a Vale of Tears

One of his earliest literary works, the peculiar dramatized prose “Croatian Rhapsody” (1917), which Krleža resolutely continued to republish in various contexts until he finally included it in his collection of novellas The Croatian God Mars, is already inspired by the Croatian national question. This disillusioned portrait of Croatia in the year 1917 implicitly takes up the modernist tradition of mourning for the homeland that had begun a few years previously with the canonical, genre-bending sonnet “1909” by the Croatian modernist Antun Gustav Matoš.3 While Matoš’s patriotism was repeatedly praised by later critics, Krleža’s wounded love for his homeland was curiously overlooked. In contrast 2  My translation. In the following, all translations will be my own unless otherwise specified. 3  Matoš’s sonnet refers to the scandalous Friedjung Trial in Zagreb in 1909 in which the representatives of the so-called Croatian-Serbian Coalition were sentenced, on the basis of forged ‘proofs’, for plotting against the Empire. The original sonnet and my “prosaic” translation (a note on the sonnet’s “motherly figure” of the homeland: in the original, the name Croatia, Hrvatska, is feminine): “Na vješalima. Suha kao prut. /Na uzničkome zidu. Zidu srama./ Pod njome crna zločinačka jama,/ Ubistva mjesto, tamno kao blud. (On the gallows. Thin as a staff./ On the prisoners’ wall. Wall of shame./ Below her the black criminals’ hole, /The place of murder, dark as sodomy.). Ja vidjeh negdje ladanjski taj skut,/ Jer takvo lice ima moja mama,/ A slične oči neka krasna dama:/ Na lijepo mjesto zaveo me put! (Somewhere I saw this country skirt/ For my mother has such a face, / And similar eyes, a wonderful lady: /The path led me to such a beautiful place!). I mjesto nje u kobnu rupu skočih, /I krvavim si njenim znojem smočih/ Moj drski obraz kao suzama. (And I in her stead lept into the fatal hole, / And with her bloody sweat /As if with tears I / wetted my brazen cheek.). Jer Hrvatsku mi moju objesiše,/ Ko lopova, dok njeno ime briše,/ Za volju ne znam kome, žbir u suzama! (They have hanged my Croatia,/ Like a thief while a policeman/ Erases her name, I know not for whose benefit!).”

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to Matoš’s sonnet, with its brief tragic portrayal of the homeland, Krleža’s dramatic dialogue with its hypertrophied stage directions allows him to introduce a number of figures representative of society in order to create a dark, almost degenerate collective portrayal of the nation. This emotionally charged prose, a feverish railway vision of the social underworld of steam, soot, horror, misery, decay and madness, is a prime example of the young Expressionist Krleža. The reader is presented with an overcrowded third-class Hungarian State Railway carriage containing the sick, widows, mothers and children disfigured by disease, soldiers from the front, sailors, old men, students, the disabled, starving Bosnians, railway watchmen and comic actors. This colorful retinue is paraded by the Croatian Genius, who, “beaten, wounded, sick, exhausted, stabbed to death, torn apart, spat on, despised”, summons the sun like a messiah (“Hrvatska rapsodija” 415). The catastrophic carriage owned by the reviled Hungarian ruler—it is hard to say whether in this context it is hallucinated or real—is expressly identified with the dirty, swampy and flooded homeland in whose “prisons, cafeterias and editorial offices so many talents suffer” (394). Out of the indescribable pain and misery of the travelers lost to their devilish fate crystallizes, in a conversation between two of them, the hope for the arrival of the savior, the redeemer, the genius whose mission is to give shape and sense to the endless suffering of the Croats.4 Contemporary Croatian poets and painters, caught in their self-delusional world without the slightest contact with their ravaged and plundered country sinking in a bath of blood and damnation, are portrayed as weaklings who are not up to the historical challenge of the moment. And, indeed, the Croatian Genius that has been summoned arises from one of the coffins in which the “entire Croatian tradition”—dukes, kings, Bogomils5 and heroes, scholars and fanatics, “the waxen and the mute”— 4  Krleža tended to insert imaginary dialogue into his novellas, essays, travel reports, diary entries and novels (Žmegač 35ff.), the contrasting positions reflecting his own internal conflict of opinion. At first glance, his reluctance to take sides appears to be rooted in the late Habsburg spirit of seeking to establish a balance between extremes, as identified by Hermann Bahr (153). A prime example of the “either-and-or principle” (Menasse 16) of Krleža’s selfreflection is his essay “Uspomeni Karla Krausa“ (In memory of Karl Kraus) from the collection of essays Eppur si muove (1938). However, this interminably contrapuntal thought technique of his, born of his persistent self-contradiction (cf. footnote 15), not only draws on Nietzsche’s or the late-Habsburg legacy, but is moreover part of a European tradition of “Socratic dialogue”, widely attested and thoroughly examined by Mikhail Bakhtin in his book Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, the most prominent exponents of which were Diderot, Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Blanchot or, more recently, Foucault (in Archaeology of Knowledge). 5  “Bogomils” refers to members of the Bosnian Church, who in Krleža’s view (and in that of most of his contemporaries) were forced to undergo Islamification by the Ottomans. For the scholarly repudiation of this prejudicial view which persists to this day, see footnote 32.

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awaits its awakening. The savior himself appears despondent, miserable and broken, a pure agglomerate of wounds, humiliations and curses that have accumulated throughout Croatia’s unhappy history, but “a star flashes over his head” (“Hrvatska rapsodija” 410–411). Accompanied by the wounded and the dead who have risen from their graves, he takes over control of the train from the engine driver, and aims, accelerating madly, towards the fields and farmland. /T/he hospitals collapse, the graves open, the dead sing the psalms and the train rushes over them, destroys and annihilates them. Raging, it hits the bell towers, buildings, structures, crushes them, dismembers them and leaves behind a red trail of flames and blood. Like an earthquake it pounces on the lands, shakes and annihilates the cathedrals, theaters, academies, barracks, palaces, castles, editorial offices, studios, offices, churches, parliaments, chapels, lies, luxurious Croatian lies […] (417) The unmistakable enthusiasm with which the narrator portrays the people’s trail of vengeance led by the Croatian Genius can primarily be explained by the fact that this prose was written in the incendiary atmosphere of the February and October Revolutions, which clearly made a strong impression on the young Krleža. As Expressionist and pathetic as the “Croatian Rhapsody” may appear to us today, having been born of an historical frenzy, it reveals the foundational characteristics of Krleža’s future rendering of the national question in almost exemplary fashion. These characteristics can be summarized thus: 1.

2. 3.

a morbid, mournful, almost victimized portrayal of both Croatia’s historical fate and its present condition: both are characterized by the merciless suppression of Croatian national feeling; one can speak, then, of an oppressive Croatian continuity; the authority of the dead ancestors’ suffering legitimizes the liberating activities of their living descendants, since both are concerned with the same basic issue, the self-determination of the people; while the older Krleža repeatedly criticized contemporary historians for recognizing suppressed national feeling in epochs that could not have known it,6 the younger Krleža adopts this homogenizing,

6  As early as “A Few Words on Petty-Bourgeois Historicism In and Of Itself” (1926), Krleža conceived a fundamental critique of historicism. In this work he writes: “Our entire petty bourgeois history of the idealistic constancy of one and the same Croatianness as a supernatural phenomenon is a sham” (“Nekoliko riječi” 114). In the “Theses” (written in 1935, published in 1953) we also encounter a harsh criticism of Romantic national historiography’s veneration

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uncritical retrospective projection of the national spirit with great enthusiasm; such a “primordialistic” portrayal of the tragedy of the nation becomes a bellicose, revolutionary “masculine” imperative instead of a dolefully resigned “feminine” appraisal:7 the task of the liberator is to awaken the enormous strength of a people numbed by eons of mistreatment;8

of the Middle Ages. Although they were an epoch of “terrible illiteracy, murder, backwardness and omniferous material misery”, the Middle Ages are uncritically projected onto the national consciousness of the nineteenth century (“Teze” 493–94). This criticism is continued in 1959 in his encyclopedic entries on Croatian cultural history. In the entry on King Bodin, for instance, he writes: “Our historiography is romantically loquatious, it is naïve and one of its principal shortcomings is that it portrays the legendary personalities of long ago whose contours we are barely able to recognize in the mist of far-off centuries […] as presentday phenomena […] with an often transparent intention of the petty smuggling of the obvious untruths and chauvinist innuendos of the politics of the day” (Eseji 354). Krleža terms this practice regrettable provincial propaganda characterizing the nationally charged atmosphere after the First World War. In his entry on the aristocratic Balšići dynasty, he asserts that these medieval aristocrats and kings were a long way from “moving on the historical stage like the pathetic heroes of our National Opera”, “inspired by a single hungry notion of stealing as many foreign goats as possible”. They were simply “robbers, adventurers and wanderers, whose living conditions were anything but comfortable” (370). In the entry “Branimir” we read that the first Croatian kings did not champion Western religious and cultural values in as angelic and metaphysical a fashion as Croatian historiography claims, but acted as the protagonists of political schisms, conspiracies and upheavals (376–80). 7  In Krleža’s eyes, all revolutions, and hence national ones too, are a decidedly male affair. (This view is admittedly not specific to East Central Europe. On the exclusively male conception of the national liberation movements in India, see Das 18–37). Krleža unreservedly followed Nietzsche’s principle of the struggle (on the struggle as a founding principle of life in Nietzsche’s philosophy, see Hanssen 97–158) and dismissed any weaklings incapable of taking up the fight as “dreamers” and “talentless poets” (Davni dani I 30). A large part of these weaklings is constituted by women. Krleža terms them “besotted widows” with “cow’s eyes”, “vulgar hens”, “geese” (Davni dani I 32, 36, 52) and is particularly brutal in his treatment of women who have dared to appropriate male attributes: they are stigmatized either as “dragons”, “giants”, “Amazons” or as “flees” and “gnats” (Davni dani I 358; Davni dani II 9). For Krleža, women should be content with their role as comforting guardian angels (Davni dani I 52, 209). 8  In Krleža’s interpretation, the people are a fundamentally spineless, obedient entity: “tail between the legs, and done! That’s ‘the peoples’!” (Davni dani I 164), “The people is something which allows itself to be led” (Davni dani I 334). The people must thus be set in motion by a strong revolutionary will.

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5.

Krleža discovers the pattern for realizing this imperative in the uncompromising visionaries of Croatian liberation from the past who have continued to excite him despite the failure of their emancipatory projects; 6. in a gesture representative of the entire interwar East-Central European region, his project almost seamlessly merges social and national revolution:9 it is not the foreign petty bourgeois intellectuals, but the broader, anonymous masses with whom these intellectuals have lost all contact that will bring the Croatian people the freedom for which it has yearned for so long. All these characteristics of his formulation of the Croatian national question can be recognized in his subsequent avant-garde manifesto “The Croatian Literary Lie”, albeit with a different emphasis.10 The topic of the “luxurious lie” of the Croatian artists and intellectuals who fall over themselves to imitate the foreign models is taken directly from the “Croatian Rhapsody”. However, in between the two works (within a mere half a year!) a number of great historical events took place—the end of the First World War, the collapse of the Dual Monarchy and the triumph of the October Revolution—which served to fuel Krleža’s argument further. People were forced to witness in horror how the flames of these singular events swallowed up the Old World before their very eyes, virtually overnight. It was now time to redefine the values that remained 9  Krleža thus contrasts the Western European distinction between social, economic and national questions with the undifferentiating East-Central European approach. See Berend 202: “/P/eripheral backwardness (or a post-Versailles shock and fear in Germany of being forced back to the periphery) collapsed all these economic, social, and national problems into one dramatic central question about national survival and revival. […] The social and economic goals were all expressed in a national program […] which allowed social programs and national goals to mix in calls for ‘social justice.’ ” 10  If we consider the artists of Young Vienna and the way they sought in art a moral haven from the deceit of the politics of the day that prevailed in their state as having set the tone for the entire Habsburg cultural space (Schorske 8–9), then it might seem unusual that an artistic avant-garde manifesto in the same cultural space was concerned with the national question. However, in the atmosphere of the collapse of the empire around the turn the century, this question was at the forefront of the minds of young artists in every subjugated and backward nation of the Dual Monarchy, as outlined above. For them, in contrast to their colleagues in imperial Vienna, the artistic revolution and the political revolution went hand in hand. Even the young Hungarian artists tirelessly emphasized the poverty, economic backwardness and the unjust social situation in their homeland and perceived their art as an instrument of national liberation (Hának 77–78).

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deeply rooted in the consciousness of the alienated Croatian intelligentsia. To this end, the young Krleža, like other East-Central European intellectuals of his time, enthusiastically employed Friedrich Nietzsche’s program of resolutely redefining all values in the sphere of the politics of the day.11

Burning Alienated Life Forms

In contrast to the dramatized prose “Croatian Rhapsody”, the genre of his literary manifesto is marked by a militant, almost destructive discourse. The text begins with the repeated battle-cry “Fire! Fire!”, in allusion to the magazine The Flame, which Krleža edited together with August Cesarec and in the inaugural issue of which “The Croatian Literary Lie” was published.12 The fire is aimed at the contemporary Croatian intelligentsia, a horde of obedient slaves to the foreign, either blinded to the revolutionary demands of the age or, even worse, determined to ignore them at any price. To prove that these intellectuals continued to flee from the demands of the popular revolution, Krleža draws a parallel between the attitude of the advocates of the so-called Illyrian National Revival13 to the revolutions of 1848 and the attitude of his contemporaries to the October Revolution. It is not surprising that the latter mediocre individuals venerated the former by conferring on them the status of popular reformers even though it was “not a revival and […] did not regenerate anything” (“Hrvatska književna laž” 32). For Krleža, the Illyrian reformers remained slaves to “a terrible, cruel Croatian tradition” of medieval subservience to their overlords and an apparently willing (but actually brutally enforced) “submission to the emperor of that which belonged to him” (33–34). Instead of rousing the nation from its slumber, they have sent it to sleep, as if “to be 11  On Nietzsche’s influence on Krleža, see Stančić 13–50. 12  The title of the magazine clearly alludes to the famous contemporary magazine Die Fackel, edited by Karl Kraus. But, characteristically, the flame points to a different aspect of the revolution than Die Fackel: destruction rather than the enlightenment of old values. On the influence of Karl Kraus’s radical criticism and biting polemical style on Krleža, see Stančić 116–55. 13  Today, this romantic national movement in Croatia goes by the name of “The Croatian National Revival”. But the spokesmen of the movement both perceived and described themselves as Illyrians, not as Croats. Indeed, the majority of them were not “ethnic” Croats. Moreover, Ljudevit Gaj’s selection of the (also) Serbian Štokavian dialect as the basis of the standard Croatian language points to his belief in South Slavic unity. According to Hobsbawm (Nations and Nationalism 54–55), this decision by the spokesman of the Illyrian Movement paved the way for the subsequent development of Serbo-Croatian.

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a Croat” meant to feel like one was “disappearing under the foot of the black and gold emperor”. On the contrary, for Krleža such behavior means either not realizing that one exists as a Croat or not existing as a Croat at all, since for him Croatianness is manifested in the “vital flame” that swallows up all life forms that have withered and become estranged from the people. “Enough of this smell and stench of that which is decaying, dead and wrong!” (34) In the nationally charged post-Versaille East-Central European atmosphere, the social revolution of the economically exploited and embittered people seems to have taken on, quite unnoticed, a national character. Their own economic and social misery is blamed on the foreign rulers, on their merciless oppression and exploitation. Centuries of keen cooperation with the imperial power by Croat political and social elites go unmentioned. Krleža equally skips that Habsburg state-building policies as launched by Maria Theresa and Joseph II enjoyed an active support of peasantry and educated middle classes because they reduced the local nobility’s privileges and powers. (Judson 28– 32) Countless people engaged with the Habsburg dynasty’s efforts to build a unified and unifying imperial state, often appropriating their programs, practices and institutions for their own purposes. In the Austrian Empire founded in 1804 many social groups identified strongly with their empire. (48–49) Portraying the Habsburgs simply as perpetrators and the Croats as victims implies a crude “reduction of [the] complexity” of the “imperial relationship” that amounts to petty bourgeois moral opposition. Following this spontaneous but drastic mythologizing of the elaborate administrative system of the Empire— with all its direct and indirect beneficiaries and casualties—Krleža associates the (then) contemporary political situation with that of the Illyrian Movement (in the first half of the nineteenth century) and even with that of the Middle Ages in order to legitimize his argument of long-standing Croatian political dispossession. Nonchalantly drawing an arc between such far-off epochs with completely different political, ethnic and social structures was one of his favorite rhetorical strategies during the interwar period.14 However plausible they 14  For example, in the essay “A Few Words on Petty Bourgeois Historicism In and Of Itself” (1926) Krleža contrives to link the peasants’ revolt led by the Croatian serf Matija Gubec against his feudal lord (1573) with the Serbian uprising against the Ottomans some 250 years later (“Nekoliko riječi” 101). In the same essay, he equates the national political fate of the Croats after the First World War with that of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (106–109), even though the age clearly saw no attempt to “establish Croatian sovereignty” (107). Krleža nevertheless blithely continues to create counterfactual analogies. “The analogies of the Croatian fate from that first, distant and still chaotic age when the Croats died as Avaric slaves together with their masters under the walls of Istanbul, from the Carolingian-Byzantine epoch, from the time of Roman vassaldom, to the catastrophe

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may occasionally seem, such extravagant analogies gloss over the necessity of attentive historical differentiation with respect to the ethnic, political and social discontinuities between the phenomena he compares. It is in keeping with Krleža’s famous tendency to disprove his own theories15 that he would repeatedly draw attention, especially in the encyclopedic work of his later years, to the necessity of carefully establishing such historical differences. But let us return to reconstructing the basic argument of “The Croatian Literary Lie” of his youth. Krleža goes on to support his parallel between the Illyrians and his contemporaries with the “decorative Catholicism” of Croatian Modernism, the representatives of which use their “literary magazines” to prettify the desperate, backward and systematically exploited Croatian village, embellish the Croatian huts with luxurious decoration and tame and dilute the of the peoples’ dynasties, sadly correspond with the bloody situations under the Arpad dynasty, under the Neapolitan and Jagiellonian kings, under the Turks and Habsburgs: the Croatian head is forever on the chopping block, and the Croatian purse is plundered, since foreign wars abide beneath the Croatian roof […] These facts remain to this day.” (110). In the essay “On Dominican Father Juraj Križanić” (1929) he constructs an almost seamless continuity of the idea of long-divided Croatianness, from the Pan-Slavic ideology of Juraj Križanić (1660s and 1670s) to the thought of the Illyrians (in the 1830s), Franjo Rački, Josip Juraj Strossmayer (in the 1860s) and Stjepan Radić (in the 1930s) (“O patru dominikancu” 58–69). In the essay “On Kranjčevićs Poetry” (1931) he draws an equally undifferentiating parallel between the Croatian martyrs Juraj Križanić (a PanSlavic visionary), Silvije Strahimir Kranjčević (a poet), Frano Supilo (a politician), Stjepan Radić (another politician) and Josip Kosor (a prose fiction writer and dramatist), all of whom he considers “symptoms of the division and disproportions of our situation” (“O Kranjčevićevoj lirici” 29). 15  “Anyone engaging with Krleža’s oeuvre engages with an oeuvre that unceasingly negates itself […]” (Lasić 12). This too is symptomatic of the late-Habsburg legacy; compare this passage from Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s “The Letter of Lord Chandos”: “I experience in and around me a blissful, never-ending interplay, and among the objects playing against one another there is not one into which I cannot flow” (Hofmannsthal, The Letter 77). Menasse (17) suggests that the accelerated change of political identity in East Central Europe led to “distrust of any clear, positively formed identity” and hence “all the founding principles of the Second Republic were largely derived from negation”. “And whenever decisions were arrived at that were specific in their content and arrived at positively, in practice they were immediately sublated by their opposites.” But Krleža’s literary predecessors and contemporaries beyond the late Habsburg cultural space also practiced the duplication, splitting and reproduction of their egos as a variety of alter egos, for instance Gabrielle D’Annunzio, Luigi Pirandello, André Gide or Fernando Pessoa. The dissolution of the uniform ego into a series of competing personas thus appears to have been a general and fundamental aspect of the skepticism towards identity in an age of drawn-out end times (of moribund empires).

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brute strength of the “Balkan people” with their miserable imitations of foreign models. This salon literature remains foreign to a Croatian people that has been tortured, held captive in the “cursed cage” and mistreated by a host of selfappointed tamers over the “last one thousand five-hundred years” (“Hrvatska književna laž” 35–36). Employing troubling populist rhetoric inspired by the explosive situation of the then newly formed states throughout East Central Europe, (Berend 185–202) Krleža portrays this people as a “dangerously violent horde driven by dark urges”, a barbaric and raging monster, thirsting for life, that will not be stopped by the “lies of national heroism” (“Hrvatska književna laž” 36). The latter is namely, along with “decorative Catholicism”, the second principal form of concealing the true problem of Croatia, and in Krleža’s interpretation amounts to the Greater Serbian Kosovo mythology. He was probably taking aim at its contemporary advocates, the Croatian artists Ivo Vojnović and Ivan Meštrović: A new ethic of struggle is being preached, new heroic eras are being injected, the sword and spurs are being jangled and in all that it is forgotten that it is purely the racket of a Mass. This nationalism is a lie and an empty phrase just as the decadent L’art pour l’art is a lie and an empty phrase and just as these rows of sarcophagi, deceased heroes and dead academics are lies and empty phrases. (37) The blustering Greater Serbian nationalism is not the appropriate antidote to the decadent Croatian Catholicism, since both belong to the medieval inventory whose final collapse is being prepared by the people, “like an ocean great and deep and black” (37). Both are mummies of whom today only the Illyrians could be proud if they were to miraculously rise from their graves. They alone would then enthusiastically welcome their revived South Slavic idols with flagwaving and songs of praise! But we need a different kind of revival, one that was heralded by the waving of the red flags of the Russian Commune and the tolling of the bells of the proletarian International. The impetus will be come from the arsonists who can “heroically burn all these paper lies and drain our swamp and stable with Herculean strength” (40). It is a revival, then, from below and not from above—the humiliated and injured can only draw on the instrument of absolute destruction—and at this end point of his argumentation Krleža reintroduces the messiah. Astonishingly, this figure is no longer exclusively Croatian, in contrast to the “Croatian Rhapsody”. The Croatian Genius has suddenly become a “savior” (Spasonosni) who is better suited to bridging the religious chasm between Byzantium and Rome in the South Slavic context (i.e. between the Serbs and the Croats). (40) To

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an extent, Krleža has prepared us for this international transformation of his messiah. Firstly, he wrote this manifesto in Ekavian, in keeping with the proclaimed editorial policy of the magazine; secondly, he writes here of a “barbaric Balkan people”, which was not the case in “Croatian Rhapsody”; and thirdly he argues in the entirely new political context of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. But the most important reason for his sudden transcensus of the Croatian national framework in “The Croatian Literary Lie” might be sought in the Bolshevist idea, which was international in character. Lenin was of the opinion that the Bolshevik Revolution could not be successful if it were to restrict itself to the backward Russian national sphere,16 and at the time Krleža supported him unflinchingly. It was this that brought about his shift from the vehement negation of the foreignness of the Croatian petty bourgeoisie to political Yugoslavism. This ideology would not hold him for long however—as early as 1926, in Excursion to Russia, he rejects with bitter irony the “sublation” of the Croatian and Serbian national orientation by the “Yugoslav synthesis” (Izlet u Rusiju 39). Whatever one might think of Krleža’s political oscillation, “The Croatian Literary Lie” is marked by certain cracks in what remains a nonchalant amalgamation of social and national revolutions from the “Croatian Rhapsody”. The manifesto’s social platform of communality breaches the novella’s national platform by taking into consideration that the Serbian peasantry suffers just as much as its Croatian counterpart. It is now all about the liberation of the peasants, not the Croats. The national platform seems to be too restrictive for an author inspired by Marxism. But in subsequent years the Marxist social platform compromised its supposedly supranational character just as quickly, since Stalin hastily Russified the Soviet Union as ‘genuine class property’ in the 1920s. In such a changeable ideological atmosphere, for a long time Krleža oscillated between the ideas of social and national revolution. Neither seems to have satisfied him. A hint of this coming oscillation, which would last until his “Theses for a Discussion in the Year 1935”, can already be observed towards the end of “The Croatian Literary Lie”. Three advocates of the revolutionary liberation of the people who remained inspirational for Krleža—the Bogomils, Juraj Križanić and Silvije Strahimir Kranjčević—are depicted as supporting “Yugoslav tradition and continuity” (“Hrvatska književna laž” 40), while he would later describe the latter two as visionaries who acted on behalf of the dispossessed Croatian people.

16  On the development of the national idea in the Soviet Union, see Berend 203–23 and Martin 1–28 and 432–61.

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Elective Affinities between Dreamers and Martyrs

The national profile of his messiah swings back and forth, then, but Krleža remains passionately interested in the revolutionary fantasists. He gradually transformed them into models for his own self-perception. Juraj Križanić17 was just one of Krleža’s rich gallery of those with whom he felt ‘elective affinities’, a gallery that transcends the Croatian borders and includes figures such as Saint Augustine, Columbus, Michelangelo, Erasmus of Rotterdam, Darwin and Lenin. But Križanić is particularly important, since in Krleža’s interpretation his Pan-Slavism sought to rescue a homeland that had been torn apart since the seventeenth century, and because such self-sacrifice anticipated the actions of the contemporary Croatian politician Stjepan Radić,18 who gave his life just as selflessly for the Croatian cause. Krleža’s deep frustration with the political situation seems to have led him to identify with both martyrs of the Croatian idea, as the parallel he draws between them in the essay “The Death of Stjepan Radić” (1928) suggests. The piece is a eulogy not only for Radić, but also for the Croatian dreams of communities of Slavic states. In an essay published two years earlier, entitled “Stjepan Radić in Belgrade”, he writes that these Pan-Slavic fantasies were born of a “neglected and forgotten peripheral existence” felt by a “provincial civilization” (“Stjepan Radić u Beogradu” 222). Croatia’s geopolitical location, which for centuries made it a mere tangental territory of foreign powers, led to a “disorientated migration” and self-vilification on the part of Croatian intellectuals, who rushed from one relationship of subordination to another, turning their gaze from the “serious, difficult, sad and true reality of their own oppressed and enslaved people”, which they continue to do to this day (224–25). In regarding Križanić and Radić as constituent parts of a nationally homogenous history of victimhood, in line with the penchant for audacious analogies we have outlined above, Krleža not only draws a parallel with his own contemporary situation, but also projects his abashed feeling of dispossessed Croatianness onto historical epochs that could hardly share it. “The continuity of Croatian shame is uninterrupted,” he writes, “whereby in place of the patriots 17  Juraj Križanić (1618–1683) was a Croatian writer, theologian and political thinker gripped by the Pan-Slavic idea who twice travelled to Russia, where he would ultimately be incarcerated for fifteen years, in the attempt to realize his Utopian ideas politically. His works were not published until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 18  Stjepan Radić (1871–1928) was the founder of the Croatian Peasants’ Party and briefly the minister of education in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. He died after being shot by a Montenegrin delegate during a parliamentary session.

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oriented towards Hungary today the patriots enthused with Yugoslavism have taken over the leading role” (228–29). Annoyed by Radić’s acting like “the gypsy fiddler who draws his bow into the hairy ears of the Yugoslav policeman”, he sees in this desperate alignment with one party and fear of another the typical fate of the small dispossessed and disenfranchised peoples caught up in the storm of incomparably stronger powers. Two Croatian martyrs who unsuccessfully sought a solution to the national question in Pan-Slavism instead of in the “social problem” merely provide further confirmation that “our lamentable national mourning continues and there has been no change for the better in three-hundred years of Croatianness” (“Stjepan Radić na odru” 269). The victimhood myth of national dispossession as the basic characteristic of Croatia’s fate throughout the centuries thus begins to manifest itself quite clearly as early as 1928. To demonstrate how unswervingly Krleža was fascinated with unhappy Croatian dreamers and interpreted the collapse of their projects as being due to their inability to escape the long-standing national history of dispossession, let us now take a closer look at the essay “A Discussion with Frano Supilo’s Shadow” (1924), which preceded the essays on Stjepan Radić from 1926 and 1928.19 All three essays were composed during the frustrated atmosphere shortly before the transformation of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes into the Kingdom of Yugoslavia with its dictatorial constitution. In the very year he wrote the essay, Krleža had fully realized that the Croats could expect no more from the long-awaited Yugoslav platform than the repetition of the bitter imperial times before it. Nothing had changed. The Viennese “policy of lies, deceit, political trials, corruption, libelous press, terror and the murder of their own citizens, Spanish ceremony and dishonest, despicable, feigned loyalty” was resurrected as a “non-intelligent Balkan variation” (“Razgovor sa sjenom Frana Supila” 209). The argument in “The Croatian Literary Lie” of a collapse from one form of subordination to another, of the transition from decorative Catholicism to Kosovo romanticism, returns almost unchanged: The Croatian kings who towards the end of one century reveal themselves like ghosts in a dream to some of our eminences, bishops and canons, at the beginning of another are transformed on the stage of national consciousness into Serbs. […] Kikerec’s oil painting was replaced by Kosovo romanticism as the only poetic solace. (193)

19  Krleža worked it into his abovementioned travel report Excursion to Russia in 1926.

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Instead of this ineffective alternative between the poles of which the Croatian weaklings oscillated, the solution to the Croatian national question was to be sought by following the radical revolutionaries—i.e., in this essay, Frano Supilo. As one of the few moral champions of legitimate Croatian constitutional law, Supilo had followed in the footsteps of Ante Starčević20 by advocating autonomous liberation from the yoke of the Austrian state with resolute and visionary zeal. And yet ultimately he, like his quixotic predecessors Križanić and Radić, was enticed into the centuries-old Croatian victimhood matrix of “salvation through occupation” and destroyed. In contrast to the uncompromising Croatian Genius of the “Croatian Rhapsody”, all these advocates were ultimately forced to play the games of the politics of the day, since they were unable to combine the Croatian national question with the social and economic question of the oppressed Croatian masses, which proved catastrophic for both them and their people.

The Radical Ideal of Self-Determination

After a five-year Yugoslav intermezzo (1919–1924), Krleža thus returns to the national revolutionary imperative of the “Croatian Rhapsody”, here too combining it with the awakening of the largest social classes. There can be no negotiating with the foreign rulers; the people must violently depose them in order to finally gain independence. With the Treaty of Versailles, the idea of national self-determination, culminating in self-partition, was transposed from the long-standing Western European nation states onto the fractured postimperial political space of East Central Europe, with devastating consequences (Berend 154). The ground for this transposition was prepared by Herder’s idea of the cultural nation, which the East-Central European peoples embraced as the foundation of their Romantic national movements in the mid-nineteenth century. Herder’s idea of the ‘original’ character of peoples and the right to self-determination that went with it was now established in terms of state politics. In the interbellum, the phantom of self-determination swept through the newly formed nation states, igniting compensatory populist ideologies and dreams of sovereignty in their politically, economically and socially unstable democracies characterized by poverty and suffering. The East-Central European population, with its strong ethnic, religious, cultural and linguistic diversity and mutual reliance forged by centuries of imperial rule, had been 20  Ante Starčević (1823–1896) was a nationalist ideologist, co-founder of the Croatian Party of Rights and an advocate of a Croatian state independent from the Habsburg monarchy.

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excluded from the long tradition of independent states and was hence ripe for the emphatic ideologies of segregation and partition (Brubaker, Nationalism reframed). Significantly, these heated ethno-nationalisms stood in stark contrast to the cold-blooded calculating of the politics of the day, the realpolitik of the Western European nation states, and were thus perceived as “barbaric” by Western politicians (and carry this stigma to this day).21 Yet these communal projects borne by projections of desires were able to attract countless domestic supporters, since the aim of sovereignty presented the masses, provided they were prepared to make sacrifices in the short term, with the prospect of complete and ultimate salvation from their precarious social and economic situation (Hanson xvi). Surprisingly, Krleža proved a fanatical advocate of such starkly counterfactual projects of sovereignty.22 As a typical writer of the ideologically charged East-Central European political and intellectual sphere, he had a deep loathing of the cold-blooded and pragmatic, devious calculating approach of the politics of the day characteristic of Western Europe.23 For him, politics was a prophetic vision, not a business driven by various interests. That is the historical and geopolitical background to Krleža’s essay on Supilo, in which he champions the absolute sovereignty of the people. But which people does he have in mind when he writes of their self-determination? In “The Croatian Literary Lie” he was already hesitant about how to define the people: in national Croatian or social (class) parameters embracing several peoples? The essay on Supilo, composed in 1924, appears to remain true to this wavering between Croatia and the South Slavic Balkans as platforms of collective identity. Yet no more than two years later, in Excursion to Russia (1926), we encounter the following lines, in which Krleža leaves no doubts as to the fact that he considers himself a Croat: What are we now? Austria has collapsed, hence we are no longer Austrians. We are not Serbs, why should we lie to ourselves that we are when we are not! We are not Yugoslavs, for if Yugoslavdom equates to what Duke Stepa 21  On recent attempts to remove this stigma see Calhoun, Valadez. 22  He sought to achieve sovereignty not only on the collective, but also on the individual level through his anarchic, individualist views in a fashion similar to Max Stirner. For Krleža, during the interwar period individual freedom is the highest goal for which all social elements must be uncompromisingly sacrificed. Following this line of argument, I analyze in great detail his diary prose Davni dani (Bygone Days) in the chapter “Lice diskurza” (The Person/Face of Discourse) in my book Doba svjedočenja (The Age of Testimony). 23  On this policy of rational choices see Hanson xvi–xviii.

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Stepanović or one of the Yugoslav monopolists, Jurica Demetrović, wants, who in their right mind can be a Yugoslav together with them? What remains for us is to strew ashes upon our heads and return to the womb of this unbelievable and spat-upon Croatianness to which Stjepan Radić has proposed the same drunken toast for thirty years. Izlet u Rusiju 36

In the essay “A Few Words on Petty-Bourgeois Historicism In and Of Itself”, written around the same time, we nevertheless discover that Krleža’s Croatianness is neither pragmatically calculating nor opportunistic, and certainly not conservative and petty bourgeois like that of Stjepan Radić. Krleža has utter contempt for such small-minded national consciousness which “has been vegetating since the most ancient Glagolitic times” (“Nekoliko riječi o malograđanskom historizmu uopće” 100) in that it seeks to escape one tyrant by bowing down to another. His national consciousness can be considered Bolshevist, as paradoxical as that may sound, since it lays claim to the absolute right to self-determination in the name of the déclassé Croatian people. Krleža defines Croatian state law in proletarian terms, as it were, employing a characteristically tacit transformation of class characteristics into national ones.24 To him, the Croats are, in their continuous and radical dispossession from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century, the epitome of the unpropertied proletarian people. Krleža’s social formulation of the Croatian national question leaves a strange impression, to put it mildly. For a long time it was held that Marxist doctrine, with its internationalism developed on the basis of class, suppresses the national question, if it does not indeed exclude it altogether. What has an economically dispossessed social class got to do with a politically dispossessed nation? Yet recent studies disprove this tenacious and long-standing academic conviction.25 The struggle for national independence in East Central Europe could only register its first political results with the collapse of the Ottoman, 24  In this respect he is only unique in the Croatian context, however, since this “undifferentiating” argumentative strategy is employed by many of his contemporary revolutionary intellectuals in the East-Central European space. For the young Hungarian writers of the early twentieth century, for example, national liberation and social reform meant the same thing. “To them ‘the people’ simply meant workers who made their living by the sweat of their brow, the poor peasants, servants, and day-wage men, or the ‘fourth estate’ if you will, who spoke out in concert but without identifying with the bourgeoisie against domination by the aristocrats and bishops” (Hának 86–87). 25  See for instance Brubaker Nationalism reframed, Martin.

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Austro-Hungarian, Russian and German empires after the First World War. Consequently, the pressing social and economic questions in this geopolitical region were all traced back to the decisive national question, in which the ultimate solution to these questions was sought, however counter-factual that may appear. In foregrounding the right to national self-determination, the Treaty of Versailles awakened in East-Central European countries utopian hopes for the final salvation from their misery, since almost without exception they interpreted their social, economic and cultural backwardness as a logical consequence of the national question that had remained politically unsolved for centuries.

From Class to the Nation, from Dispossession to Empowerment

This state of affairs moved Lenin to adapt Marxist doctrine, which had been developed under completely different geohistorical conditions in Western Europe, to the Eastern European situation. To this end, he interpreted the national movements as the closest allies of the socialist revolution and accordingly integrated the right to self-determination of all peoples of the Soviet Union into The Right of Nations to Self-Determination (1917). The party program of 1919 went as far as to assert the right to self-partition even for the peoples of the Soviet Union. But in the post-imperial East-Central European space with its heavily mixed population, such an extension of the principle of selfdetermination, including the principle of self-partition, was fraught with risks. The minorities of the new nation states, seeing in the pressures of national homogenization the threat of being assimilated without trace, quite logically sought to protect themselves by claiming the same right. In doing so, they made reference to their “external homelands” to which they suddenly felt they belonged. The result was the permanent destabilizing of the states in question. The political stage that was intended for parliamentary democracy and liberal values was suddenly occupied by petty tyrants who roused national passions as the instrument for the solution of social and economic problems. Probably in order to avoid this fate, Stalin replaced the federalization that had begun in the Soviet Union with the centralization of the superstate. He was supported in his policy by the fact that socialism had not become international as Lenin had envisaged and that in order to save it and to catch up with the developed countries of the West, the Soviet Union had to drastically accelerate its economic development. By establishing the doctrine of “Socialism in One Country” in Problems of Leninism (1924), Stalin Russified the Revolution nolens volens, turning it against the West and transforming it into a question

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of Russian national prestige. The resultant healing of the inferiority complexes of a marginal and backward people through the inflation of the national consciousness was received enthusiastically by the members of the Communist Party. Most encouraged by this mass enthusiasm, Stalin stoked the wounded national consciousness further with a mournful history of Russian victimhood that now urgently required bringing to an end: One feature of the history of old Russia was the continual beatings she suffered because of her backwardness. She was beaten by the Mongol khans. She was beaten by the Turkish beys. She was beaten by the Swedish feudal lords. She was beaten by the Polish and Lithuanian gentry. She was beaten by the British and French capitalists. She was beaten by the Japanese barons. All beat her—because of her backwardness […]. We are 50 or 100 years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in 10 years. Either we do it, or we shall go under. Stalin 528–29

This history of dispossession in the service of self-empowerment is not only reminiscent of the contemporaneous National Socialist history of conspiracy against the German people,26 but also Krleža’s incessant lamentations on the godforsakenness of the Croats enslaved by foreign powers. In similar fashion, he claims that this unhappy continuity must now be radically brought to an end. Although his lamentations tried to heal the unbearable inferiority complex with analogous revolutionary fantasies,27 fortunately they were not able to have the same devastating impact as the National Socialist or Stalinist narratives of dispossession. On the contrary, Krleža’s history of national dispossession, written by a writer without the slightest pretentions to realpolitische power, i.e. by an intellectual par excellence, was largely ignored by the public. It also clearly occupied a low rank in the international contest of victim narratives. Although the Croats were just as embittered as these two large postimperial peoples, the political power for which they strove as compensation 26  According to Arendt (Elemente und Ursprünge 744–45), the Nazis insisted on only one global conspiracy, namely the Jewish one, while Bolshevik propaganda produced one global conspiracy after another. 27  Paradoxically, Krleža himself addressed this directly proportional relationship between despair and enthusiasm, using the example of Juraj Križanić: “The more untolerable and bloody it became in Croatia, the more intensively his illusions blazed” (“O patru dominikancu Jurju Križaniću” 57–58). But this principle can be observed just as well in his own activities, which he fails to recognize however.

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for their longstanding political dispossession obviously cannot be compared with that of the Russian and German imperial successor states. This is the point at which the parallels end between the dispossession narratives of the huge German and Russian peoples as conceived in the official political publications and that of the little Croatian people in the oppositional writings of Miroslav Krleža. Not all dispossession narratives are equally potent, nor are they all equally empowering. A narrative’s potential to empower is connected to the public establishment and canonization of a particular dispossession narrative, which requires a number of resources (such as discourses, genres, media and institutions).28 Although—or perhaps indeed because—his despairing portrayal of the Croatian historical fate under certain political circumstances was far from being officially recognized, Krleža stuck to his story of suffering almost fanatically.29 In doing so, he spontaneously followed the tendency of all Romantic ethnonationalists, in that he found the source of the most intense pride, if not indeed personal pleasure, in the deepest despair, in resolutely rubbing salt into his own wounds. As long as this peculiar enjoyment through self-torment prevails, the narrative of suffering refuses to come to an end.30 28  On this important point see Alexander 13–16 and Brunner 41–54. On the empowerment of victims in the African post-colonial context see Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers; for the Eastern European post-imperial context see Verdery 83–103. 29  His incessant lament about his own country is, on the other hand, a common feature of the East-Central European post-imperial border territory. It is also encountered for instance in the young Hungarian writers of the early twentieth century, with whose work Krleža, who could speak Hungarian, was very familiar. Endre Ady, for example, describes his country as a “wasteland”, for Mihály Babits it is a “black hole”, and both repeatedly describe it as prehistoric, oppressed, backward and pitiful (Hának 79–80). The stark selfpity might thus be interpreted as the predominant mood of all (post-)imperial European provincial regions. 30  I interpret this characteristically East-Central European (post-)imperial self-torment, or the tendency for self-perception to blindly adopt the degrading relationship of the ruler to the self, as a necessary counterpart to the unreflective adoption of this relationship (of the ruler to the self) in the perception of the foreign, which Bakić-Hayden aptly termed “nesting Orientalisms” (Bakić-Hayden). The initial adoption—the prime example of which is the enthusiastic adoption of Herder’s degrading concept of the “original” Slavic people by the intellectuals in the newly formed Slavic nation states of East Central Europe—was discovered much earlier in the (post-)colonial context by post-colonial theorists and has been the subject of much insightful analysis. As early as the beginning of the twentieth century (in 1903), William Du Bois (8) writes of “double-consciousness, the sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of the others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that always looks on in amused contempt and pity”. As early as 1952, the

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Even in the “Theses for a Discussion in the Year 1935”, which he prepared for a meeting of the Executive Council of his Workers’ Party, he bemoans the lamentable fate of the Croats. They had been “completely perforated after the Turkish retreat south of the River Sava, reduced to the virtually inexistent social nothingness of the impoverished mob and peasants, disfigured by the hundreds of years of wars fought for foreign interests, occupied by the foreign, mainly Hungarian aristocracy with its colonizing attitude” (“Teze za jednu diskusiju” 573).31 The echo of the “Croatian Rhapsody” is unmistakable. The Croatian Genius appears to be “defeated by the blows from the battles against the pirates on the Adria, for the Anjou dynasty in the Apennines, for the Arpad dynasty on the Drau, for the Habsburgs in the Balkans and Europe”, “starved like a slave in the American mines, like a damned pariah”, “all wounds, congealed blood, damnation” (“Hrvatska rapsodija” 411). In the Theses we read further: Croatia lost its historical feudal position in the Turkish wars and the liquidation of its own national aristocracy around the middle of the sixteenth century reduced it to the level of an Austrian border region. Since then it has merely been vegetating and lamenting its lost historical rights […]. Teze za jednu diskusiju 573

other pioneer of post-colonial theory, Frantz Fanon (Black Masks 210ff.), offered a welldeveloped analysis of the self-torment of the slave after adopting the relationship of the ruler to himself. Lauren Berlant recently termed the same tendency of those at the mercy of today’s neoliberalism as a “cruel optimism”. For Berlant, “optimism is cruel when the object/scene that ignites a sense of possibility actually makes it impossible to attain the expansive transformation for which a person or a people risks striving; and, doubly, it is cruel insofar as the very pleasures of being inside a relation have become sustaining regardless of the content of the relation, such that a person or a world finds itself bound to a situation of profound threat that is, at the same time, profoundly confirming” (Berlant 2). 31  There are several manifestations of this narrative of suffering in Krleža. In the diary entry for 9 May, 1916, we find for instance a similarly blithe homogenizing of the Croatian historical fate: “In a historical moment when there is pathetic talk of the people, the question of our situation in space and time is just as open as it was in the beginning when we appeared in this part of the world. […] Literally nothing has changed from the Lombardic and Frankish times to this day: the Franks or the Hungarian Home Guard barracks—a constant” (Davni dani 1 151; Krleža edited the diary during the Second World War). Or in the entry for 22 May, 1917: “I think of Croatia, of our sad, illiterate, dear, backward, unhappy Croatia. Croatia is actually a quiet, modest, neglected country […], so forgotten and so Catholically crumpled, that today Hungarian sausages and greaves (from human flesh) are wrapped in the Magna Carta of their privileges […]” (Davni dani 1 254).

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After this typical historical retrospective, Krleža jumps forward to the situation of the Croats under the Yugoslav monarchy. He depicts the impoverishment of entire provinces under the steel helmet of the police. “The police escort on the train […], the beating in the chimney, broken bones, gallows, the suspects’ being thrown out of the police rooms on the third floor, the inquisition, the confiscation and complete withdrawal of Western European civil liberty” meant that the Croatian people was threatened by “the same powers that Islamified the Bogomils” (523–24).32 “Just as the Croats subjugated themselves to the Austrian Empire out of fear of the Turks, today they are threatened by a similar historical catastrophe” (512). The longstanding provincial conditions produce nothing but martyrs, whom Krleža apostrophizes until his identification with their courageous, but sadly merely spiritual “opening of stellar space in the deepest provincial regions” (“O Kranjčevićevoj lirici” 39) becomes quite unmistakable. His narcissistic tendency to select Croatian artists, intellectuals and politicians from history and transform them into reflections of his own despair knew virtually no bounds. For instance, he notes that the linguistic reformer Ljudevit Gaj died isolated and reviled, the painter Vjekoslav Karas committed suicide, the bishop and patron of the arts and sciences Josip Juraj Strossmayer withdrew from the political struggle, the poet August Harambašić died in misery, the poet Antun Gustav Matoš wandered disconsolately through the world, the poet Silvije Strahimir Kranjčević migrated in despair to Bosnia,

32  For today’s (impartial) historiography there is no longer any doubt firstly that the Islamification of the Bogomils (in this case the members of the Bosnian Church) was not entirely enforced by the Ottomans, but was partially a voluntary and pragmatic decision on the part of the local population, secondly, that Islamification was part of a long drawnout process with many stages, thirdly, that it concerned not only the Bogomils but also the Bosnian Catholics and Orthodox Christians in equal measure, and, fourthly, that the Bosnian Bogomils also converted to Catholicism and Orthodoxy (Donia and Fine 14–19). In fact, when the Ottomans started to attack Bosnia, its Christian notables preferred to submit to them rather than to the Hungarians, because the Hungarians intended to impose Catholicism on the entire population of Bosnia whereas the Ottomans respected the threefold religious web of the kingdom. Because of frequent clashes between Orthodoxy and Catholicism as well as mutual mistreatment before of the Ottoman arrival, both groups favored the Ottomans’ religious tolerance, which stimulated conversion to Islam. (Foteva 91) Krleža however continues to attempt to apportion total responsibility for this conversion to the foreign rulers and to suppress the participation of the local population in its own “self-alienation”. In line with the strong polarizing structures shared by all victim narratives (Arendt, Elemente und Ursprünge 745–66 and Alexander 16–19), he insists on a stark “moral” opposition between the perpetrators and the victims.

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and the novelist Ante Kovačić ended up in a lunatic asylum (“Teze za jednu diskusiju” 496–97).33 Instead of bewailing this disgustingly depressing situation, he continues to insist on the activist program of his youth. As noted above, the deeper his despair, “the more intensively his illusions blazed!” The challenge is to cleanse a wide front of proletarians and peasants of the petty bourgeois chauvinist residue and to finally put down the foreign exploiters. In this argumentation, the populist merging of political, social and economic problems in a dramatic question of national existence characteristic of the feverish national passions in the interwar East-Central European region clearly triumphs. Although at the beginning of the same essay he voices harsh criticism of Croatian historians for their uncritical retrospective projection of national consciousness onto prenational epochs, strangely he continues his line of argument by depicting a thousand years of Croatian history as an uninterrupted struggle for the survival of the nation that must now be brought to completion. In the decades prior to the October Revolution, the Russian populists too subscribed to the myth that the sleeping princess of the Russian peasantry would reawaken and live on after the despotic tsar had been killed (Berend 83). Since the merciless battles were continued after his dethronement, factual history soberly disproved this counter-factual belief. Did Krleža similarly believe that all the catastrophes of the Croatian people would disappear once it had deposed its tyrants and realized its right to self-determination? If so—and everything would point towards this being the case—then his starkly polemical dispossession narrative threatens (even if unwittingly and unintentionally) to turn into a narrative of the empowerment of the Croatian people. That is a transformation that characterizes not only the Stalinist narrative of the dispossession of the Russian people, but also the National Socialist narrative of the dispossession of the Germans. As is well known, the Nazis set in motion the victim narrative of the dispossession of the German people by the Jews in order to legitimize their devastating National Socialist revolution. As emphasized above, Krleža’s dispossession narrative lacked comparable potential for realization. However, on the conceptual level, in his permanently agitated discourse the revolutionary program of the radical dis-alienation of the Croatian people represents precisely the same parallel attack on the foreign “oppressors” (in this case Austrians, Hungarians, Serbs) and the “traitors” from within. In the East-Central European space however, the big problem of singling out the indigenous from the foreign resides in the fact that due to a long common imperial history, these components are inseparably 33  For the full list of Croatian martyrs see “O Kranjčevićevoj lirici” 37.

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intertwined, which meant that any attempts at such purges in the region had devastating consequences. The same tragic results were produced, incidentally, by the purges in the post-imperial African states, as Mahmood Mamdani demonstrates in his book on the Rwandan genocide, When Victims Become Killers. The grotesque escalation of dispossession narratives applies to nations small and large, European and non-European, imperial and post-imperial (i.e. the North Americans and the Israelis) in equal measure. Krleža did not experience the collapse of Yugoslavia and with it the ultimate impact of his radicalization of the self-determination principle.34 But in the light of what we have experienced in the course of those developments, it is remarkable that he advocated arson, alongside the uncompromising dismissal of the petty bourgeoisie from the body of the nation, as the method with which to topple old values. He has his “Genius” with the locomotive, the embodiment of accelerated Bolshevist progress, destroy and annihilate “the cathedrals, theaters, academies, barracks, palaces, castles, editorial offices, studios, churches, parliaments, chapels” and in so doing leave the “red trail of flames and blood” (see above). By allowing themselves to be led by such a compensatory revolt, the East-Central European revolutions of the twentieth century—the Western European revolutions took place, by and large, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—not only failed to follow through on their promise to improve socioeconomic conditions in their countries, but actually set in motion their neglect. But Krleža is certainly not about to embrace this perspective to question the program of radical self-determination he rashly adopted from the amalgamation of Leninism and Marxist pragmatism, be it on the collective or on the individual level. The idea of radical self-determination thus becomes the blind spot in his conception of the Croatian national question. The experience of the EastCentral European nation states has shown that the solution to the political national question does not necessarily entail the solution to the socio-economic questions of the people, nor indeed vice versa. Once the persistent illusion of 34  Here the intention is certainly not to blame Krleža’s radicalization of the principle of selfdetermination for its subsequent devastating geopolitical consequences in the region. That would amount to positing a causal relationship between the two phenomena, which would be to unduly simplify the problem. Hence I regard Krleža’s argument, as Broch regards the late art of the nineteenth century, for instance, rather as “an initial symptom of a world-shaking whose end we cannot perceive even today, and the artists of that time, themselves full of artistic self-discipline, were heralds of anarchical dissoluteness, forebears of the new breed of men […] of the darkest anarchy, the darkest atavism, the darkest cruelty” (Hugo von Hofmannsthal 46).

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a people’s “natural rootedness” in its own inherited national spirit which its members are supposedly “born into” is abolished, it becomes clear that the liberation of this community from the “foreign” and exploitative “invaders” in various areas of collective life is anything but automatic, rather it amounts to a “mission impossible.” The political, social and economic divisions, each following its own laws, cannot be changed once and for all by a single, uniform revolution, since the solution to one area represents an obstacle to the solution to another. The antagonistic, indeed sometimes explosive relationship of these heterogeneous aspects of human cohabitation explains why the radical program of self-determination, be it primarily social, economic or political, fails to produce satisfactory results, let alone an ultimate solution. Freedom appears to be not so much a state of happiness brought about by collective or individual identities as a laborious practice they have to take up time and again. In the light of this sobering realization, our task today is to give consideration to a new approach, namely to recognize that each case of sovereignty is in principle and inevitably already dispossessed. It is only after, in the late eighteenth century, the Volk was turned into an object of common policies that apply to everyone equally that the consciousness of its “nationhood” and subject-character became possible (Judson, The Habsburg Empire 48–49). Dispossession is thus a permanent internal component of sovereignty rather than an enemy that is to be wiped out. In this perspective, untainted sovereignty is nothing more than a defensive phantasm, salutary in the short term, extraordinarily influential and apparently inevitable, yet at the same time fateful. This phantasm becomes all the more dangerous the more sovereignty is perceived as an unquestionable component of one’s own or another’s identity. Such an approach could however lead us to fundamentally revise our established idea not only of EastCentral, but also of Western European political identities.

Chapter 4

The Carnival’s Victims: Miloš Crnjanski’s The Mask and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Arabella Shortly after publishing his one-act play The Mask (December 1918), Miloš Crnjanski wrote to Ivo Andrić (January 12, 1919) that “he does not care that the gentlemen [i.e. his critics] will mention Rostand and Hofmannsthal” (Maska, 221). Ultimately, no one mentioned Rostand but Dragutin Prohaska did indeed state that The Mask “strongly reminds him of Hofmannsthal” (Prohaska 128). His impression was confirmed more than fifty years later, in the first extensive and influential reading of Crnjanski’s play by Mirjana Miočinović (1972). She remarks that the play’s scenography and general taste are “undoubtedly similar to Hofmannsthal’s and Schnitzler’s worlds”, which, in turn, are reminiscent of the Italian baroque tradition (Miočinović 133–134).1 These correspondences between The Mask and Hofmannsthal’s dramas deserve more attentive research since they open up a cross-national and cross-cultural perspective beyond the restricted “methodological nationalism” (Ulrich Beck) of recent literary historiographies. Moreover, by investigating them, we will come to discover two writers who are “stranded in the present” (Fritzsche) of their nationally enflamed post-imperial constellations. A common experience of non-belonging—although one of the central (Austrian) kind and other of the peripheral (Serbian) kind—gave rise to these writers’ shared tendency to establish an expanded community of victims beyond identifiable territorial and temporal terms.

The “Poetic/Lyric” Comedy and Its All-Encompassing Community of Victims

To motivate people for the introduction of a new type of commonality, the writers were firstly obliged to detach themselves from the established communicational patterns of their extant communities. In his slightly revised version of 1923, Crnjanski classified his play as a “poetic comedy” that recalls Hofmannsthal’s early “lyric plays”, his “comedy for music” Rosenkavalier (1910), 1  Here and in the following, all translations from Serbian, Croatian, Russian and German are my own unless otherwise specified.

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but in the first place his “lyric comedy” Arabella (1929). The basic characteristic of this hybrid subgenre is that it distracts from the focus on action that is usually considered to be germane to the drama genre.2 In the “poetic comedy,” the public space of common action undergoes disengagement, giving rise to the private space of the characters’ affects and emotions. Through such reorientation ‘minor’ concerns of female characters and other social outsiders who do not move history forwards, at least not from the dominant male view, take center stage. Rather than acting in a goal-directed manner, as a drama ‘normally’ requires from its main characters, these dispossessed figures do everything to exempt themselves from the envisaged progress, which they perceive as a catastrophe. They repeatedly abandon the action in order to take a pause, compose themselves, and recollect everything that was excluded from it and thus doomed to an apocryphal existence.3 It is through such excursions into the metaphysical (Crnjanski) or mythical sphere (Hofmannsthal) beyond the domain of dramatic action that the poetic, lyric or musical quality penetrates the time and space horizons of the dispossessed characters. These transgressions into an extraterritorial and extemporal sphere often interrupt their contact with other characters or make their communication with them amount to complete misunderstandings.4 According to Musil’s narrator in The Man without Qualities, who unremittingly reflects on Austria’s deeply disconcerted society prior to the First World War, the heightened contingency of the age engendered a new and ineffable form of psyche, which he calls the “modern soul” and ironically describes as the “void” (Musil 185–186). Although it has no identifiable substance, or precisely because of this, it voids all identifiable substances that cross its path. It bridges huge distances between the oceans and continents with ease but finds it very difficult to establish contacts with “the souls accommodated behind the next corner” (220). The poetic comedy’s characters demonstrate an abundance of such a fleeting “soul”, i.e. a tendency to deactivate the boundaries of the present reality in favor of an “oceanic 2  I say “usually” because all classical theories of drama insist on this focus. However, in the context of today’s genre theory, such genre definitions give the impression of an inappropriate ‘essentialism’. 3  Schäfer (44–47) points to the importance of stepping-outside-oneself (Aus-Sich-SelbstHeraustreten), pausing (Innehalten) and recollecting (Eingedenken) in the structure of Hofmannsthal’s libretti. These operations were equally pertinent to medieval communities’ folk festivities, the tradition of which, as transmitted by the baroque comedies, these libretti transfer to the individual plane. 4   For Frajnd, all communication between Crnjanski’s characters is characterized by misunderstanding.

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feeling” of merging with the whole universe.5 Since the “souls” feel dispossessed by the present reality, it permanently induces their discomfort, despair, and irritation as well as the desire for a complete self-dissolution in an ‘organic community’. However, the poetic comedy does not only voice frustration through its general atmosphere, the way it shapes its characters or the failed communication between them. As a peculiar subgenre, it also interrupts the linear development of the drama genre, forcing it to commemorate its forgotten and suppressed phases. This therapeutic reminiscence enables its authors to exempt themselves from their presents in the same way that the transgressions into another time and space liberated their characters from the pressures of their realities. If it seems that the authors of the Viennese fin de siècle leap out of their present back into the epoch of the Italian baroque drama, this is not because they seek short-term consolation in this drama’s unbridled carnival atmosphere. No, they are much more attracted to its ritual character that clearly detaches its extraterritorial and extemporal scene from the reality of the present. It is precisely because the baroque theatre’s ceremonial stage is catapulted out of the present reality—like that of the medieval carnival, the tradition of which it resumes against the Renaissance mimetic theatre—that it demonstrates the ambition to be a proper theatrum mundi. No theatre that belongs to the present space and time could raise such a claim. The community such a theatre addresses, in a thematic as well as communicational sense, is too restricted. In view of the poetic comedy’s presented profile, I wish to propose the following thesis: both the transgressions of its characters into alternative worlds and the recourse of its authors to the baroque theatre’s extraterritorial and extemporal world represent attempts by these dispossessed subjects to exempt themselves from their present realities. However, I do not take these self-exemptions to be their deliberate actions but rather the involuntary operations of their “memory as it flushes up at a moment of danger” (Benjamin, “Über den Begriff” 255). Opposing the usual way of thinking that departs from the sovereign subject, Benjamin states in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History” that memory takes possession of a subject haunted by the feeling of non-belonging to his/her historical epoch and explodes into his/her present, distracting his/ her attention and rearticulating its habitual priorities. By this surreptitious counter-historical action, the respective subject is catapulted out of his/her unbearable present and relegated into an extraterritorial and extemporal nowtime. Not only do the poetic comedy’s authors unite in this peculiar now-time 5  Freud discusses the concept of “oceanic feeling” right at the beginning of his treatise “Das Unbehagen in der Kultur” (Civilization and Its Discontents) from 1930.

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with their characters but also with one another. Crnjanski and Hofmannsthal belong together inasmuch as they do not belong to their respective presents and surroundings. In fact, according to Benjamin, no subject fully belongs just to his or her present time and space but also simultaneously to the distant times and spaces due to his or her constitutively divided memory archive. If voluntary memory connects a subject with his or her respective present, involuntary memory pulls him or her out of it into an association with distant subjects. It draws the human being into an interminable chain of transmissions by reducing its distinction from the animal, for animals cannot really survive without inheriting their instincts from their ancestors. Opposing the then dominant philosophy of life inspired by the Enlightenment attachment to the present, in the wake of the Romanticist addiction to the past, Benjamin thus resolutely reconnects human life with its immemorial “animal” origins.6 In his interpretation, life establishes a dense network of relationships between its creatures and phenomena, which they unconsciously depend on since it escapes their conscious insight and control. This network comes into expression in all its creatures—the animate ones (such as humans and animal beings) and the inanimate ones (such as languages and artworks)—in the form of their constitutively escaping origin that unremittingly subverts their autonomy and sovereignty. Benjamin’s argument implies that, after the involuntary memory archive was doomed to apocryphal existence, it became an important reservoir of the outsiders and victims for their present realities. Indeed, as he points out, in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”, Freud interprets this reservoir as consisting of memory traces that either circumvented the defense mechanisms of the consciousness or were left due to the incomplete procession of certain experiences 6  Benjamin’s work grows out of the same post-imperial feeling of being dispossessed of the past as that of Hofmannsthal and Crnjanski (Hofmannsthal was born in 1874, Benjamin 1892, and Crnjanski 1893). (One has to bear in mind that “The fall of the Habsburgs automatically turned the 25 percent of the Viennese population born outside the frontiers of the new Austria into foreigners” (Hobsbawm, “The End of Empires” 15). Although Hofmannsthal himself was not born beyond these frontiers, his grandfather was, which Hofmannsthal was not spared of realizing.) All three writers were victims of revolutionary breaks, which explains their common attachment to a Romanticist heritage, in its turn likewise shaped by its bearers’ experience of a historical catastrophe (i.e. the Empire’s dissolution). History has dispossessed all of them, making them strangers in their own presents. Like French and German Romanticists, they longed to reconnect with the past via its deeply ruined remnants (Fritzsche 55–131). This gives their post-imperial works a characteristically melancholic or nostalgic ‘aura’.

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(Benjamin, “Über einige Motive bei Baudelaire” 615). How active they become depends on the pressure imposed upon the consciousness of the outsiders and victims by the circumstances of their present realities. This pressure can mobilize the subconscious “mimetic faculty” as a means of self-exemption from the imposed circumstances. Although these circumstances are, of course, not imposed equally cruelly on all who are involved in them, those who do find themselves traumatized by them, in order to escape them, spontaneously activate a “mystic communion” (639) with the unknown subjects in which an “immemorial prehistory […] murmurs” (640).7 So as to qualify for this extemporal community, they dispossess themselves of their “I”, or “reflexive consciousness”, or human face for that matter, because these pillars of self-identification connect them to their historically given presents (Der Begriff der Kunstkritik 40, 81, 218). The “expressionless” (ausdruckslos; 181), or “undefinable” (undefinierbar; “Über einige Motive bei Baudelaire” 639), or “unapproachable” (unnahbar; 647) quality,8 which they acquire through this disconnection from their presents and reconnection with their dispossessed ancestors and contemporaries, elevates them into an elusive non-time and non-space of “elective affinities” (Wahlverwandtschaften). But the prerequisite for such an elevation is the sacrificial dissolution of their present distinctive selves through their immersion in an ‘oceanic feeling’ of commonality. It is time to return to Crnjanski and Hofmannsthal. Along with many other post-imperial writers, they were befallen by the traumatic reconfiguration of their communities induced by a complex, elusive and unpredictable network of forces that came into being with the First World War. Crnjanski was a Habsburg Serb from Vojvodina who, like his compatriots, was frustrated by the Empire he was affiliated to,9 but was equally resolute in his rejection of the 7  It is in this sense, after all, that Hofmannsthal addresses the “original, extemporal, eternal” (beginnlich, unzeitlich, zeitlos) horizon of the present (“Die Idee Europa” 46). 8  The contesting, ‘voiding’ character of these qualities points to the weak messianic inspiration of Benjamin’s thought, in which the Messiah acquires the traits of the Absent God in negative theology. As Derrida remarks in his essay “How to Avoid Speaking”, “only a negative (“apophatic”) attribution can claim to approach God.” “God’s name would fit everything that cannot be broached, approached or designated, except in an indirect and negative way” (146). 9  With Crnjanski’s generous assistance (from the second half of the 1920s), recent Serbian (literary) historiography typically tends to overstate this frustration, thus subjecting the imperial past of the Serbian people to a revengeful process of “reverse colonization” (“you have colonized us with your ‘progressive’ ideas, now we, the historians, will retroactively colonize you with our ‘regressive’ ones”). Although nation and empire became two polar opposites in early twentieth-century imagination, they in fact “repeatedly constituted each other in

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Ottoman Serbs’ jubilant nationalism that uncritically evoked the time of medieval glory, forgetting about the ignorance of the immoral medieval Serbian nobility for the suffering peasants. The present Serbian authorities obliterated this ignorance because, in the First World War, the Serbian officers similarly disregarded tortured Serbian soldiers.10 Whatever the case might have been, the young Crnjanski’s affinity for the ‘simple people’ testifies to his deep discomfort with his politically reconfigured community as shaped by the triumphant social elite. As regards Hofmannsthal, the demise of Austrian liberalism followed by the rise of ethnic antisemitism toward the end of the nineteenth century confronted all assimilated Viennese Jews with their Jewishness. They responded to this challenge differently, either by replacing their liberal values with those of German nationalism or Zionism or, as Hofmannsthal did, by continuing with liberalism in a modified artistic form. He was a fully assimilated “Vienna patrician, educated in Catholic spirit, who barely recalled his Jewish origins” (Broch, Hofmannsthal und seine Zeit 74), but because assimilated Jews were more educated than most of the Gentiles, “the very strategy of assimilation through Bildung was jeopardizing the acceptance of Jews in general, by making them something special again: no longer Jewish, but not really Gentile either” (Beller terms created by and for each other” (Judson, The Habsburg Empire 275). As Karen Barkey put it, empires did repopulate areas and move groups around, but it makes little sense to blame them for what was typically modern ethnic or religious hatred (Barkey 103), since in imperial times the asymmetry pertained in the first place to the relationship between the imperial core and its peripheries. Yet given that the new nation-states in the periphery “were left with minorities within their territory, they replicated the imperial relationship of domination between a core ethnic group and minorities” (107). On top of that, their elites “have been trained, socialized and politicized in the context of empire and have become elites through functioning within the empire” (110). Blaming empires for the hatred against one specific nation usually aims at averting attention from the rich and complex interaction of this nation’s elite with imperial legacies. Such sacrificial versions of national history rely on a selective memory that eternalizes one narrative of the past while erasing the others. “Despite a rhetoric that insisted on their nation-based character, I argue that many of the states that replaced Austria-Hungary could more usefully be considered little empires, given the ways they administered their populations, legitimated themselves, and conceptualized cultural difference.” (Judson, The Habsburg Empire 388). 10  Crnjanski develops this “social” or “class” argument in a series of poems in The Lyrics of Ithaca (Lirika Itake, 1919) as well as several stories from The Stories about Manly Affairs (Priče o muškom, 1920). Their complex literary structure, however, prevents straightforward ideological readings. Ješić (81–82) warns that the Yugoslav army rejected Crnjanski’s application for an officer position after the war because he was an Austro-Hungarian conscript, i.e. an enemy during the war.

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134). Hofmannsthal sensed he was “the chosen one of a higher degree; he was chosen from the chosen people” (Broch, Hofmannsthal und seine Zeit 80). A special role was allocated to him, “one might say a secular version of the chosen people” (Beller 217), which induced his “arrogant isolation” in the “ethical seriousness” (Broch, Hofmannsthal und seine Zeit 87). Countering the frivolous aestheticism that was dominant, he developed an almost religious faith in the social mission of art. But the (re)union with the people he was desperately seeking was at the turn of the century increasingly threatened, as the links of commonality dissolved one after another. The First World War signaled their complete collapse. Benjamin complained that this war annihilated the value of common experience because it “left nothing unchanged except the clouds […] and the tiny and fragile human body beneath them” (“Erfahrung” 291). In accordance with this insight, Crnjanski states in his famous “Sumatra” manifest (1920)—an exemplarily demonstration of the “modern soul’s” tendency to deactivate contacts with fellow beings in favor of those with distant ones (Musil 220)—that he “one day sensed all of the powerlessness of our life and the complexity of our destiny” (Crnjanski, “Objašnjenje ‘Sumatre’ ” 150). Everything is so complicated. They changed us; I recalled the way that we lived before and bowed my head. The train continued on and roared. It lulled me into thoughts of how this is so unusual, this life with distances inside. There are no places which our pains have not reached; no persons whom we have not caressed in foreign lands. And not me, not him, not tens nor thousands but millions of us. […] I sensed all our powerlessness, all our sadness. […] But deep, in my soul, despite all the resilience, I suddenly felt an immeasurable love for these distant hills, the snowy mountains, up to the icy seas. […] And all of this complexity turned into a huge peace and limitless consolation. (152–153) Anticipating this insight into the evasive and unpredictable network of relations that determine the course of the world, in his lecture on “The Poet and this Epoch” (1906), Hofmannsthal, in turn, reasons: The essence of our epoch is ambiguity and indeterminacy. It can rest only on the slippery (das Gleitende) and is aware that it is slippery, whereas other generations trusted the solid. A gentle chronic dizziness vibrates in it. There is a lot in it that announces itself only to the few, and there is a lot not in it that many trust is there. Der Dichter 60

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To give expression to this experience of being dispossessed of any firm anchorage, Crnjanski and Hofmannsthal shape their comedies in such a way so as to dispossess their characters’ communication with the world of all certainty. Far from being sovereign in their action and behavior, their characters turn out to be poor masks in the predetermined carnival they are unaware of. Such rewriting of the contemporary comedy parallels the way in which, for example, Robert Musil, Joseph Roth and Ivo Andrić reconfigured the contemporary idea of the novel. They transformed the novel into a kind of the epic in which, in retrospect, the narrator opens to his readership an educational insight into the characters’ failed efforts to make the course of their lives obey their wishes. In the same way that the novel resumed the epic memento mori, the comedies of Crnjanski and Hofmannsthal reactivate the baroque drama’s melancholic attitude. If, following the Renaissance model, the bourgeois comedy deals with the jovial carnival of human life in which misguided humans seek short-term pleasures, the baroque comedy, following the medieval model, deals with the divine sad carnival to which God’s creatures are destined to fall victims. While the first carnival has a clear beginning and end, the second has an immemorial origin and an interminably postponed end, which is why the masks of its participants prove to be irremovable rather than provisional. Both The Mask and Arabella systematically juxtapose these two carnival frames, the jovial one that characterizes the subordinate horizon of characters and the melancholic one affiliated to the superordinate horizon of the author and his or her addressees. The characters enjoy the playful carnival atmosphere without heeding the threatening signs of the fatal carnival plot that, in front of the spectators’ eyes, turns them into its blinded victims. In fact, it is precisely to avert their eyes from their victimhood in the extemporal sad carnival that they enthusiastically engage in the present jovial carnival. To illustrate this, Crnjanski dates the happenings to Shrove Tuesday in 1851, which means after the bitter collapse of the Serbian national revolution in Vojvodina. The deeply frustrated protagonists of this failed uprising appear in the milieu of a fancy Viennese salon in their new pacified roles and humiliating positions. As far as the non-Serbian characters in the same salon are concerned, their carnival licentiousness is saturated with the post-1848 despair, decadence and frivolity of the Viennese noble society and is clearly associated with the First World War’s apocalyptic atmosphere when The Mask was written. To underline that those who are most enthusiastically carried by the jovial carnival atmosphere are in fact the victims of the melancholic one, Crnjanski lets the love intrigue conclude with the suicide of a betrayed protagonist. Hofmannsthal in turn dates the happenings to Shrove Tuesday in 1860, only one year after the defeat of the Austrian army at Solferino, with its concomitant bitter territorial losses and

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economic collapse, and six years before the new catastrophe at Königgrätz and the bifurcation of Empire’s sovereignty. The impoverished Austrian nobility dances at the volcano’s edge. Already by the following day, on Ash Wednesday, which reestablishes the Catholic calendar, the unbridled joy will turn into repentance—in both comedies. But in Crnjanski’s and Hofmannsthal’s view, it is not merely the enthusiastic protagonists of the short-term jovial carnival that are the victims of the longterm sad carnival, rather so too are the authors of the jovial comedies. And they likewise try to suppress this. Since they only pay attention to the gay side of human life, the side that only the select few can afford themselves, they avert their eyes from the sad side of human destiny very much like their characters do. Detaching themselves from such light-minded comedy-writers, Crnjanski and Hofmannsthal reactivate the medieval idea of comedy in the sense already affirmed by St Augustine11 and thereafter exemplified in Dante’s La Divina Commedia or, after the baroque resumed the medieval predetermined worldview, the Italian commedia dell’ arte. In fact, the baroque reactivated the medieval idea of comedy to redeem the jovial Renaissance’s victims in the same way that the fin de siècle authors reestablished the baroque idea of comedy to redeem the victims of the jovial bourgeois age. The divine script is written beforehand and only if humans realize how vain and absurd their short-term pleasures are in the face of the destiny that this scenario allocates them, will they be able to laugh over its development. A metaphysical, philosophical or ironic laughter based on the spiritual insight only becomes possible after their light-minded laughter based on the carnal ecstasy confronts its mortality. This is a superior laughter that only an extraterritorial and extemporal community of the dispossessed is capable of. Therefore, in the final analysis, the comedies by Crnjanski and Hofmannsthal project a sacrificial community that replaces the bodily ecstasy of self-affirmation with the spiritual ecstasy of self-denial through an act of self-exemption from the blinded carnival of life. In order to motivate the audience to join such a self-dispossessing community, they saturate their comedies with various signs of transience and mortality behind the backs of their characters. The spectators are thus placed in the privileged position of comprehending something that escapes not just the characters on stage but also their deluded contemporaries who are immersed in the short-term carnival of their reality. To undo the seemingly jovial terms of this carnival, Crnjanski concludes his 11  In his Commentary on the Psalm CXXVII, St Augustine describes children who invite their parents to leave earth by letting their descendants take up their roles in the world’s ongoing comedy.

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comedy with the suicide of the protagonist, just as Chekhov does, for instance, in The Seagull (1895), which was similarly composed in the apocalyptic atmosphere of another dying empire. In Crnjanski’s play, however, this suicide is but one of the warning signs. He introduces the first memento mori in his Letter to the Dramaturg and Director at the very start of the play, in which he describes the scenery. The letter instructs the director to place a skeleton dressed up in the white costume of Pierrot, a buffoon figure from the Italian commedia dell’ arte, in the left corner of the scene, abundantly decorated in a baroque style. As Mirjana Miočinović remarked in her lucid reading of The Mask, as a stage requisite, this Pierrot resurfaces in the character of the Serbian Romantic poet Branko (Radičević) who for his part wears a completely black dress, suffers from a terminal illness and complains that he is going to die soon (while he is all the time citing Radičević’s famous poem “When I Thought of Dying” [Kad mlidijah umreti]).12 Conceived as signs of the approaching (individual and collective) death, both Pierrot and Branko act as antagonists to the unbridled erotic desire and bodily life of the main protagonist, the General’s Wife (Miočinović 144–145). Following baroque plays’ well-established technique, Hofmannsthal introduces the character of the female fortune-teller (Wahrsagerin, Kartenaufschlägerin) at the beginning of Arabella. As the author’s onstage representative, she announces stage happenings, giving the spectators an opportunity to understand the developments to which the characters remain blind. Hofmannsthal makes her a representative of the divine world—she determines the play that the characters are forced to play—and, at the same time, a representative of the social underworld—fortune-telling is her sole profession that provides her with the modest means necessary for her survival. Both of these perspectives, which substantially extend the characters’ narrow perspective, not only spare her of their destiny (Schäfer 145–149), but disclose her as the author’s doppelganger on the stage. It is worth recalling that Hofmannsthal described the writer as “living in the house of time, under the stairs, where everyone must pass him and no one respects him […] an undetected beggar in the place of the dogs […] without a job in this house, without service, without rights, without duty” (“Der Dichter” 66). However, it is exactly this deeply humiliated social position that makes his or her perspective, in counter-distinction to all others, divinely all-encompassing.

12  Referring to Jean Starobinski, Miočinović draws attention to the nineteenth-century drama tradition in which Pierrot acts as the author’s double (144). As we will come to see, Branko indeed acts as Crnjanski’s double.

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For in his order of things every thing has to fit. All must and will come together in him. He is the one who connects in himself the elements of the time. The present is in him or nowhere. (68) By connecting creatures and gods, the past and the present in a manner reminiscent of theatrum mundi, Hofmannsthal provides the spectators, next to the characters’ alluring actions, with a much more extended perspective that prevents them from giving up to this allurement. (Schäfer 219–221; Foteva 160–162). By learning from the characters’ aberrations and failures, they are enlightened on the mortality of their own lives, which stimulates their detachment from the carnival of their blinded community. In such a way, Crnjanski’s and Hofmannsthal’s poetic comedies, supported by the medieval and baroque traditions they affiliate themselves to, gradually create a community of the victims of the short-term human carnivals, the victims both presented on the stage and detected in the audience. In this community’s non-time and nonplace they not only amalgamate the most divergent historical epochs and spaces but bring together creatures and inanimate natural appearances. Like a carnival community, which raises the claim to have eliminated all political and social differences between its participants, the theatrum mundi’s community thus pretends to be establishing an absolute equality among its members—an operation that only death seems capable of.

Miloš Crnjanski’s The Mask

As if denying this egalitarian ideal put on the genre’s flag, the very structure of the poetic comedy cannot but privilege the group of characters who pause and recollect their past over the group of characters who act in a purposive manner. Therefore instead of eliminating the present power asymmetry, it merely turns it on its head. Schäfer therein sees the reason for the preponderance of the female characters over their male counterparts in Hofmannsthal’s lyric comedies. According to him, females do not hesitate to pause over their affects and emotions, which makes them inferior to males in the given reality but superior to them in the world of lyric comedy (Schäfer 49–50). However, although it is true that the poetic comedy demonstrates “the power of the weak”, the picture is more complex since it is not only women who appear to be weak. On the contrary, the main character of Crnjanski’s The Mask, the General’s Wife (Generalica), demonstrates exemplary masculine traits, i.e. Don Juan behavior. In the same way that Don Juan makes women into his victims, the General’s Wife does the same with men. Through such an inversion, Crnjanski

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not only lets a woman take up a role ‘germane’ to men, but transforms a series of men into toys for her insatiable desires (Miočinović 138). They become instruments in a persistent postponement of her ageing and death, in much the same way as Don Juan unremittingly negotiates with death (Felman 25–27). Drawing on Kierkegaard’s argument from “In Vino Veritas” (the first part of his Stages on Life’s Way from 1845) and Denis de Rougemont’s Love in the Western World (1956), Miočinović points out that, mechanically repeating bodily pleasures, Don Juan’s erotic passion ignores prohibitions such as infidelity or adultery that structure a relationship based on love. Due to the principle of repetition, which the General’s Wife compulsively adheres to, the plot takes the form of a series of analogous situations in which she meets her factual or envisaged erotic partners: first Stratimirović, the military commander of the Serbian rebellion from 1848–49; then the Serbian poet Branko who sympathizes with death rather than the erotic affair into which the General’s Wife wants to push him; then the servant Jean, an affair that is obviously socially scandalous; and finally, even more scandalously, her Russian/Serbian nephew Cesare, about whom there is gossip that he is her illegitimate son (Bébé). This increasingly horrifying series (enriched by some ‘domestic trophies’ as well) is completed by the remarkable list of erotic partners from her memories (Maska 36). Through such accumulation, the General’s Wife achieves an impressive catalogue of successful seductions aimed at suppressing the emptiness of her life (Miočinović 139). The continually resurfacing void that increasingly terrifies her stems from her complete inability to bring about a pause in order to connect her present with her past. As Shoshana Felman spells out in her analysis of Molière’s Don Juan, the disconnection is the only way that Don Juan connects the episodes of his life, the discontinuity being his manner of continuing. Always on the move, he never stops, neither to build up an abode nor knit together the disjoined temporal dimensions into a unified transhistorical time (Felman 29–30). Like a machine, he multiplies the same actions to keep himself going, since stopping would mean dying. However, Don Juan is not a machine, which means that s/he ages and this abhorring ageing pushes him/ her into ever more risky affairs, until they cause the death that s/he feverishly tries to escape all the time. Whereas Molière’s Don Juan ends with the death of Don Juan himself, Crnjanski’s Mask, with its inversion of gender roles, ends with the death of Cesare/Bébé. The ambiguous attitude of the middle-aged General’s Wife to the young Cesare/Bébé—simultaneously erotic and parental—probably draws on the similarly ambiguous attitude of the middle-aged Marshall’s Wife to the young Octavian in Hofmannsthal’s Rosenkavalier (1910), with which Crnjanski, as a Viennese student, must have been familiar. Octavian’s nickname is Quin-quin,

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small child, which alludes to his naivety in matters of the heart in the same way as Cesare’s nickname Bébé alludes to an “idealist” (Maska 21) in the intercourse with women. So it is their immature erotic imagination that rejuvenates their middle-aged female patronesses, replacing their caretaking and educating function with an erotic and sexual one. Being at the same time dependents and lovers, they perceive their female partners simultaneously as mothers who raise them up and mistresses who please their desires.13 In Crnjanski’s comedy, this divided perception finds its expression in the physical redoubling of the erotically insatiable General’s Wife into the doppelganger-character of the much younger but erotically disinterested actress Mimi who longs for an etheric happiness (19). However Crnjanski does more than just let age and youth exchange their etheric and erotic attributes in the carnival atmosphere. Contrary to Hofmannsthal, whose heroine generously leaves Octavian to her younger rival Sophie, Crnjanski makes the General’s Wife perfidiously use the Actress as an instrument of her erotic passion. She permits the Actress’s marriage to Cesare—as the Marshall’s Wife does between Octavian and Sophie—but only because the General’s Wife knows that the Actress abhors and ironizes Cesare’s passion. Thus, in Hofmannsthal’s comedy in which youth wins the day and the natural order is reestablished, Octavian’s naivety escapes lethal consequences, whereas in Crnjanski’s comedy in which the unstoppable passion of the middle-aged General’s Wife perverts the natural order of things, Cesare’s idealism proves to be devastating. As the title of the comedy suggests, the mask rules the world, annihilating the natural order of things. So even though she is a woman, the General’s Wife does not belong to the group of the socially “weak” characters that use pausing in order to recollect their past. On the contrary, she is the chief representative of the group of characters that compulsively act, the harsh consequences of their actions notwithstanding. The leader of the socially “weak” group in Crnjanski’s comedy is the male character of Branko Radičević who, as a poet, bears chief responsibility for the comedy’s lyric/poetic quality. In Hofmannsthal’s libretto Arabella the carrier of this quality is, of course, Richard Strauss’ music but likewise the poetic use of language, which lets “the unspoken resonate, transmitting the remote without uttering it” (Schäfer 36). Although The Mask is not a libretto, it evokes opera through its ceremonial character, the way it develops its theme, the typology of its characters, and the use of stage directions such as amoroso,

13  It should be recalled that Freud developed his ‘scandalous’ thesis of the Oedipus complex in Totem and Taboo (1913), i.e. at approximately the same time when Rosenkavalier (1910) and The Mask (1918) were composed.

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furioso, and maestoso for its duo-scenes (Miočinović 130–38).14 Next to that, and analogous to Arabella, it acquires a poetic quality through the way in which the characters shape their dialogues. They deploy suggestive expressions that induce misunderstanding instead of clear messages that foster understanding. It is as if their replicas are directed to the distant addressees in the place of the extant interlocutors, as if the characters that utter them want to leap out of the present time and space. Marta Frajnd proposed to call this kind of nondialogic speech in The Mask the “confessional speech” (Frajnd 200–202).15 The possessor of such peculiar speech is Branko, the spiritual leader of the group of Serbian male characters in the comedy.16 Being politically, socially and culturally inferior to the Austrian salon noble class, the Serbs are, in a sense, systematically driven to forge alternative communities in this milieu. As far as their leader Branko is concerned, he is a poet who by definition apostrophizes constitutively absent addressees rather than directly addressing extant interlocutors. The composer Stanković proceeds in the same way since, despising the jovial musical forms of his contemporaries, he dedicates his music to the dead (Maska 45). Branko admires him because he himself is Pierrot’s double, i.e. death’s messenger dressed up in black, terminally ill and prepared to die soon (37). Therefore, all of the time, he addresses ‘eternity’ rather than the petty earthly preoccupations of his interlocutors. “Some cry idealism, the others communism, and I: etherism” (45). His young life’s ‘unnaturally’ passionate commitment to death counteracts the middle-aged General’s Wife’s equally ‘unnaturally’ passionate orientation toward life. This is a further significant 14  Crnjanski eliminated these stage directions from the revised version (1923). 15  According to Frajnd, not only do they let the characters’ dialogues end with misunderstanding and failure but also their actions. In Frajnd’s view, the multiplication of misunderstandings characterizes the communication in and of Crnjanski’s whole work (Frajnd 194–198). This is why his plots never reach a successful closure. 16  The political leader of this group is Prince Mihailo Obrenović III, who spent fifteen years (1844–1858) in political exile in Vienna. He does not appear in the comedy directly but is mentioned several times in the conversation between the characters. The Serbs who do appear are Patriarch Rajačić, who was 66 years old at the time, the composer Kornelije Stanković (20), the philologist Đura Daničić (26), the cavalry lieutenant colonel Đorđe Stratimirović (29), and the rich and internationally reputed Serbian aristocrat Jovan Nako (37), who founded his own theatre troop (Marjanović 170). Apart from being compatriots of the half-Serbian Cesare (whose father is of a Russian origin and mother of a Serbian origin, Voinović), they are invited to the well-reputed Viennese salon on the basis of their social and cultural status and, in the first place, youth (Branko is 28). When the Baroness and Baron criticize the General’s Wife for mingling with the ‘rude’ Serbs, she responds “I cannot withstand… I have to… they are all so young (sie sind alle so jung)” (Maska 35).

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inversion of the relationships between the females and males, young and old, typical of Hofmannsthal’s lyric comedies. In addition, Branko’s attachment to the victimhood that pulls him out of the carnal world of the Vienna carnival enjoys a high reputation among the Serbs represented in the drama. At the play’s very beginning, anticipating his own suicide at its end, the half-Serb halfRussian Cesare states: How does Branko put it? Dying early is not unhappy nor nasty, no, it is precisely an honor. (19) It is not just Cesare who appreciates Branko’s self-sacrificial stance. Responding to the salon gossiping about Branko that follows him around, the Serbian philologist Daničić speaks about Branko’s determination with great admiration (32–35). But, beyond the characters within the play, Branko’s greatest admirer was the young Crnjanski himself who not only shared his contempt for earthly values and his attachment to transcendent ones but also pretended to take up his bard position in Serbian literature and culture. Crnjanski gave an interview in 1923, on the occasion of the centennial jubilee of Branko’s birth, in which he confessed that he had closely followed the Romantic poet’s footsteps in Timişoara and Vienna,17 that in the hundred years since the poet’s death he could see a mirror that reflected his own past and that he was preparing a drama about the poet (“Intervju” 115). In fact, this drama never came into being, much like the epos about the destiny of the Serbian people that Branko had long been preparing in The Mask before giving up because he misses the audience (Maska 48). Did a missing audience likewise prevent the emergence of Crnjanski’s drama about Branko?18 Whatever the case might have been, they both sensed the approaching death that was expected to

17  See also Itaka i komentari 55, 139. 18  Branko probably missed an audience because of the Viennese ‘gay apocalypse’ that surrounded him as well as the pro-Austrian attitude of Patriarch Rajačić. Crnjanski might have missed his audience because of the post-war triumphalism of the Serbian elite and its complete oblivion of Serbian victims. Instead of this drama, in the two volumes of his novel Migrations he ultimately composed the epos of Serbian victimhood that Branko in The Mask gave up on. As Frajnd rightly remarks, the relationship between the ageing General’s Wife and the melancholic poet reappears in chapter six of the novel’s first volume as redressed in the relationship between the aged Princess Mother of Württemberg and the aged Vuk Isakovič (Frajnd 197–198).

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liberate them from their alien present.19 As Jovan Hristić remarks in his critique of the first performance of Crnjanski’s play in 1977, “Crnjanski knew […] he is Branko’s inheritor in Serbian poetry and therefore shaped the role of Branko Radičević in The Mask as one of his great poems, a lament on the destiny of his people” (Hristić 206). It is small wonder, then, that there is further correspondence between the young Crnjanski and Branko, which accounts for the role allocated to the Serbs in The Mask. Branko’s “etherism”, as generated by the escapism of “his soul” (Maska 45), parallels Crnjanski’s “sumatraism”, which equally rises from the “depths of his soul” (“Objašnjenje ‘Sumatre’ ” 153) (Miočinović 146; Pavićević). As Foucault has shown, the modern “soul” is “the effect” of the microphysical “technology of power over the body” that consists of the systematic work of normative differentiation; the soul is the residue excluded from this technology’s rules, which by its resurgence, time and again, invokes further social regulation (Foucault, “The Body of the Condemned” 176–177). From the eighteenth century onwards, according to both Foucault and Agamben, the differentiation of society systematically engendered such undifferentiated residues in the form of “zones of indistinction” (Homo Sacer 63, 112, 181). The proliferation and concatenation of these zones as exempted from the rule of law gradually generated a “state of exception” in both the public sphere and the constitution of human selves. It countered the process of differentiation based on the logic of exclusion (either-or) by the process of in-differentiation based on the logic of inclusion (as-well-as). Although this state had entered the political sphere with the French Revolution and the sphere of the self with Kant’s reflective judgment (State of Exception 37–39), Agamben claims that only “World War One (and the years following it) appear[ed] as a laboratory for testing and honing [its] functional mechanisms” (7). The exceptional atmosphere of this first global event of the modern world annihilated many established spatial, temporal, social, cultural and moral distinctions, enabling “souls”, as the most prominent counter-sites of the modern selves, to activate their unruly energy of self-exemption. This is how “other spaces” (Foucault, “Of Other Spaces”) opened up, the extraterritorial and extemporal spheres that made it “impossible to name this and that, because they shatter and tangle common names [and] contest the very possibility of grammar at its source” (Foucault, The Order of Things 18). As Musil demonstrates in his novel, the soul bridges huge distances between the oceans and continents with ease but finds it very difficult to establish 19  In his poem “Stražilovo” (1921), Crnjanski says that “he knows he will, in this spring, perilously cough” which is exactly the way Branko died. But in Crnjanski’s case this was merely wishful thinking, as his tuberculosis diagnosis was fake.

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contacts with “the souls accommodated behind the next corner” (Musil 220). In fact, it establishes “elective affinities” with distant souls that feel equally “stranded in their presents” (Fritzsche). Their flights from their present times and spaces into another sort of commonality are the defensive reactions of the weak against the ruling law that imperatively imposes itself on them. Branko thus opposes the imperial self of the General’s Wife and Crnjanski that of the triumphant war victors, drawing instead attention to the interdependence of all humans on one another (Pavićević) or the insignificance of individuals in the face of natural appearances such as the heavens, waters, winds, snows, clouds or mountains (Marjanović 159–162). If these humans and appearances are weak, silent and/or unnoticeable under given circumstances, myriads of invisible links between them, across the epochs and around the globe, make them powerful and important. This is how “the power of the weak” (Schäfer 49–50) comes into being in Crnjanski’s work—via the “oceanic feeling” of an “ecstatic community” in which, through a sacrificial self-dissolution, the border between the self and the universe disappears.20 However, Branko is not the only character in The Mask who is ready to sacrifice himself for an imagined community of the weak, although his melancholic, death-bound and indifferent profile stands in clear contrast to the Austrian gentlemen who are “enthusiastic, of an easy character, nervous” (Maska 17). True, in the introductory stage directions, it is said that his compatriots “in the salon behave like others” (17). However, they do so merely in the sense of being “sad and exhausted” (rather than “pompous and ridiculous as on the contemporaneous paintings”, 17). Crnjanski also dismantles this silly male selfpresentation in several of the stories from his collection The Stories of Manly Affairs (1920) that were written at approximately the same time as The Mask. Rather than being heroes, men are victims. This explains Crnjanski’s refrain from the poem “The Guardian and the Three Questions”—“It is sad being a 20  In “The Explanation to ‘Sumatra’ ” Crnjanski describes how he “lost fear of death, the links to his environment”, instead beginning to “sense immeasurable distances” and thereby reaching “a huge peace and limitless consolation” (“Objašnjenje ‘Sumatre’ ” 153). In her reading, Pavićević downplays the dangerous populist strain of this sacrificial logic—characteristic of the East-Central European geopolitical space after the First World War—by emphasizing Branko’s altruist orientation toward the other(s) against the selfishness of the Viennese nobility (156). He and Crnjanski, she claims, readily accept and thereby transcend death (157). Freud on the contrary stresses, in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”, that self-dissolution and ecstasy as the forms of self-sacrifice (see “Objašnjenje ‘Sumatre’ ” 148) imply a civilizational regression. They induce the delirious state of exception that he, in “The Mass Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego”, examined in the form of “mass hysteria” among other forms. I will return to this point.

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man” (Lirika Itake 40)—which pertains to all male characters in The Mask (Marjanović 174). Cesare explicitly states “I always regret men, never women” (Maska 26) and thereupon “Sadness is male illness” (30). Indeed, all men in the play are unhappy: the Austrians Bach, Schaller, the General and Jean because of the failed erotic plans in the salon and, among the Serbs, Rajačić due to the failed political objectives, Stratimirović the infidelity of the General’s Wife, Daničić the collapse of his scientific ambitions and Stanković the breakdown of the artistic ones (Marjanović 174–175; Frajnd 194–195). But being systematically despised, ignored and humiliated by the Austrians in the salon, the Serbs are exposed to an important additional frustration. It is this “ethnic stigma”, with its social and cultural corollaries, that draws them closer to Branko’s uncompromising attachment to self-sacrifice. Although almost all characters in The Mask are stigmatized—for instance the General’s Wife because of her erotic mania and incestuous desires, the actress Mimi because of her affiliation to the démi-monde, Cesare because of his incurably infantile passion, and the General, Baron Schaller and Bach because of their old age— the stigma of the Serbs is especially grave in the salon milieu. They are only tolerated to the measure of their sexual, military (Stratimirović) or financial (Nako) exploitability (Frajnd 196) but are then rejected as soon as they pretend to an acknowledged social status. The Serbian politicians (Rajačić) are incurably naive (Maska 28–29) and their artists either do not fit the fashionable musical taste (Stanković) (38), or write poetry in an exotic language that Austrians cannot understand (Branko) (34). In fact, except for Branko, Stratimirović and Daničić who appear in the duo-scenes with the General’s Wife, other Serbs have merely a group appearance, i.e. as, in Baron Schaller’s rendering, “le bagage de prince Mihail” (35). Such an indistinct ethnic presentation—in its additional ‘barbarous’ tendency toward assimilation into an even more amorphous ‘Slavic assemblage’ under Russian patronage (39, 47)—counterbalances two literary distinguished relationships introduced in the salon from the tradition of the commedia dell’ arte, i.e. the incestuous one of the General’s Wife to Cesare and the infelicitous one of Cesare to the actress Mimi (Marjanović 171; Vučković 184–185). In other words, the national-historical background of the Serbian characters contrasts the international literary background of the nonSerbian ones. In reference to the Serbs, no one mentions Byron, Winckelmann, Hugo, Goethe, Ristori, Gautier, or madame Dubarry, which would associate them with the European cultural space, but instead odd geopolitical or historical locations and names such as Srem, Stražilovo, Fruška gora, Pančevo, Temišvar, Novi Sad, Kosovo, Lovćen, Miloš Obilić or Lajos Kossuth (Miočinović, 145), which rivet them to their exotic land and their national respectively regional destiny. When the General’s Wife says she will send Branko Vigny’s La .

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mort du loup, Daničić immediately responds “That’s not for him” because he is not a learned but “natural” poet (Maska 34). What else could one expect from the representative of “le bagage de prince Mihail” who cannot but compose “village poetry” (34–35)? But if a culture that continually distinguishes individual selves is characteristic of the Austrians and Italians (the General’s Wife), then the indistinct Serbs and Slavs are pushed in the opposite direction, i.e. driven to sacrificially dissolve their distinct selves in the indistinct nature. This does not mean that they are the only “etheric” characters, as the “oceanic feeling” of merging with all-embracing nature occasionally seizes hold of other characters too. It grows for example in the “Slavic soul” of Cesare, who offers Mimi a common escape to the dreamlike Italian coast through the fantastic forest, snowy and astral landscape (58, 67); it overwhelms Mimi who looks for the oblivion of her earthly humiliations in an anonymous snowy landscape which makes “everything pass” (18–19); and takes possession even of the General’s Wife who longs to erase her own as well as the others’ passions and memories with the help of the “heaven, night and water” of her native Mediterranean landscape (38–39) (Marjanović 161). By letting all that is real melt into fantasy they provisionally replace the animate space of life in which the boundaries are clear-cut with the inanimate space of death in which the distinctions disappear and indifference wins the day. As demonstrated above, the need to escape the unbearable present is a common feature of all poetic comedy’s characters who find themselves traumatized by it. At first sight, the unbridled carnival, in which both The Mask and Arabella take place, offers these characters the opportunity to do so. However its jovial scenario is a much better fit for the Austrian characters than their Serbian counterparts who are disqualified from the carnival’s ultimate political and social benefits. The asymmetry of the surrounding reality thus unwittingly resurfaces in the carnival world, reactivating trauma for some of its participants.21 Its joviality produces victims in the same way that the sinister present from which the carnival world wants to escape does; instead of eliminating this present’s power asymmetry, it merely rearranges it. This forces the Serbian characters to look for an exit from its fake satisfaction by replacing the discriminating carnival of humans with the allegedly all-equalizing divine carnival. The underlying assumption is that the latter does not allow for any exceptions, embracing animate and inanimate beings evenly. Crnjanski thus profiles the Serbian group of 21  I have pointed out that the trauma of the failed national revolution is still fresh in the minds of the Serbian guests of the Viennese salon. The humiliations they have to face in its atmosphere cannot but reactivate it.

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characters, sacrificed by the failed revolution of 1848, via Branko’s “etherism,” as the carriers of the same egalitarian politics, which, in the traumatic aftermath of the First World War, his “sumatraism” was determined to launch. It is through this group’s perspective that Crnjanski’s “poetic comedy” acquires its timely political cut, which breaks through the boundaries of the genre, substituting the polarized society of the early expressionist drama for this genre’s blithe carnival community (Vučković 185–186). The urgent national agenda of the post-imperial periphery after the First World War, spreading out from its long isolated “zone of indistinction,” contaminates the playful atmosphere characteristic of the imperial center around the mid of the nineteenth century. Through such a discrete correspondence between two historical ‘apocalypses,’ The Mask invites the direct and collateral victims of both of them to establish a new, just and prosperous community. Nevertheless, this community’s justice was not able to avoid being tailored to the victims’ biased and restricted measure either.

Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Arabella

Through enabling the weak to come to power, the poetic/lyric comedy discloses its enchanting, compensatory character. Giving a diagnosis of his epoch, Hofmannsthal remarks that “a gentle chronic dizziness vibrates in it”, making its “givens” ambiguous and indeterminate (“Der Dichter” 60). The task of the poet is to knit together this vertiginous latency that catapults the readers out of their tranquil enjoyment of belles-lettres, throwing them into a feverish search for something that “hovers between the contents of all particular books,” for “something soul-related [Seelenhaftes]”, in a word, for “the enchantment of the poetry” that “connects them stronger than anything else with the world” (62). The phantasies of the “hundreds of thousands” of readers would fall apart without the poet’s synthesizing “magic” (64) that connects “the past and the present, the animals and the humans, the dream and the thing, the big and the small, the sublime and the trivial” (68) and calls the dead back into life (69). Being a “measureless conjurer of shadows” (Schattenbeschwörer ohne Maß), the poet redeems the suffering of the thousands by finding a suitable expression for it (70–71). A great harmonizer of the disintegrated world, “he is the place where the forces of the epoch seek to balance each other. He resembles the seismograph, which vibrates with every quake, even if it is thousands of miles away (72).” In a recognizably Christian ultimate vision, Hofmannsthal portrays his poet as a martyr-redeemer who is faced with the heroic task

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to create every second, with each pulse, under a pressure as if an ocean lays above him, lit by no lamp, not even a mine lamp, surrounded by mocking, confusing voices […] to create as spider, spinning the yearn from his own body, to carry him over the abyss of existence. (75) He sacrifices himself for the benefit of poetry from which myriads of readers expect an all-encompassing vision capable of ordering the chaos of the contemporary world (78) as well as of overcoming the devastating power of time (80–81). The universal ambition of the poet’s mission, as Hofmannsthal presents it in his essay composed at the outset of the twentieth century, finds its political justification in the essay “Austria in the Mirror of Its Literature” (1919), written after the end of the First World War and the breakup of the Dual Monarchy. The defeat of the German Alliance in the war requires a rethinking of German identity. The “tough self-assertion”, “arrogance” and “self-complacency” have to give way to the acknowledgment of the long-lasting coexistence of the Germans and Slavs (“Österreich” 23). The resumption of the Holy German Empire’s cosmopolitan heritage (23) is the only correct interpretation of the people’s will that came out of the “horrible experience of this War” (25). At the same time, it is the “great responsibility of those who are intellectually mature and have the task of interpreting the signs (of this experience) to the people” (25). Against the inconsiderate exclusivist mentality of the newly erected nation-states, Hofmannsthal points out that the nation displays, rather than “sharp boundaries” as it usually claimed, a “background that disappears into the limitless” (22). It does so especially if we think of it in terms of the people’s “naturally deep spirituality” rather than the noble cognitive terms (25). The overlapping of this argumentation with Crnjanski’s advocacy of the logic of inclusion (as-well-as) as genuine of the powerless people against the logic of exclusion (either-or) as genuine of the elite in power is obvious. Both endorse equality against discrimination and conceive of this equality as being carried by the weak. Hofmannsthal returns to the vocation of the poet in his essay “The Letters [Schrifttum] as the Spiritual Space of the Nation” from 1926. His thesis is that, if the Germans from the age of Enlightenment pursued their national spirit in the space of freedom from others, then the Germans of his age pursue it in the space of connecting with others. In “thousands of the nation’s souls a struggle takes place for a true constraint that rejects a not compelling enough constraint” (“Schrifttum” 37–38). If the Germans from the time of the Enlightenment and Romanticism had put their emphasis on their free solitude, it meanwhile became impossible to live without “trustful unity” and “valid bonds” (39). In the

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1920s, therefore, the “autonomous self of the [German] titanic searcher” has to find his or her way to the “highest community” of his or her nation (40). The task of the poet, according to “The Value and Honor of the German Language” from 1927, is to “make present” in his language “that which has passed away”, to let “the people’s soul” come to expression, its “primordial power” in which s/he takes part (“Wert” 132–133). Their cause is to give expression to that which is no longer there, which is not yet there, which might be there; but, above all, that which never was there, the absolutely impossible and therefore exceeding all reality. […] The language is a great empire of the dead, unfathomably deep; therefore we receive from it the highest life. The language stores our timeless fate and the prevalence of people’s community over all that is individual. (132) To give expression to the “whole German nation” in the sense of a “timeless community” of the dead with the living, the poet has to undertake such a gigantic “conservative revolution” in the German language (“Österreich” 41). However not all German poets are equally qualified for this task. The “foreign German” (Auslandsdeutsche)—read: an Austrian writer—has a better insight into the “enduring values” of the German tradition than the “proper” Germans who tend to overvalue themselves (“Der Auslanddeutsche” 224) and, as a consequence, produce literature that is far remote from “the people’s soul” and its “primordial power” (“Wert” 129–130; 133). Only the Austrians are ready to single out that which is European in the German spirit (“Die österreichische Idee” 457), only Austria can return to Germany the vitality and efficiency of its imperial times (“Wir Österreicher” 393). In sum, Austria represents for Germany that which the Slavs represent for Austria: the power of renewal for its imperial claim, the permanent rejuvenator of its leading role in Europe (394). The delineated development of Hofmannsthal’s ideas up until the late 1920s paves the way for the emergence of Arabella, a libretto that he finished only five days before his death in 1929 and in which he knits together many of the aforementioned political agenda. Like The Mask, by inverting a series of oppositions such as drama vs. poetry, text vs. music, men vs. women, the elite vs. the people, the old vs. the young, and the Austrian vs. the Croatian characters, Arabella endeavors to dethrone agencies in provisional possession of power by those that are presently weak. To pick up just the opposition between the elite and the people, the very way in which Hofmannsthal makes the genre of bourgeois drama step outside itself, pause and recollect its tradition by inventing the form of “lyric comedy” recalls the operation of folk festivities that force the official culture to do the same. Both lyric comedy and folk festivities translate

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the society’s devastating historical progress into the folk community’s remedial eternity. When he highlights the mythic simultaneity of the historically consecutive events in the development of German culture (ein Ineinander der nacheinander folgenden Geschehnisse, “Wir Österreicher” 392), Hofmannsthal demonstrates the messianic pathos of an everlasting folk community, characteristic of the post-imperial age: Everything that was ever there is still there; nothing is done, nothing totally dismissed, everything done has to be done again; the lived, silently transformed, steps back into the circle of life. (392)22 This revaluation of the past-oriented folk culture against the bourgeois culture firmly anchored in the present in Hofmannsthal’s work is not merely a tribute to the conservative spirit of the former Empire with its agenda for maintaining and rescuing the glorious past from the devastating present (Magris 222). Instead, I propose to read it as a part of the transnational antimodernist spirit characteristic of the East-Central European late imperial and postimperial space. The antimodernists resist the Enlightenment’s liberal and individualist agenda characteristic of the West European nation-states (and of Maria Theresa’s and Joseph II’s Habsburg Monarchy) by drawing on the Romanticist conservative values of religion, family and community.23 As the Habsburg space especially turned to these values in its decadent phase after the disastrous military defeats at Solferino (1859) and Königgrätz (1866), it is small wonder that Austrian antimodernism resumes the German Romantic 22  These lines significantly anticipate Bakhtin’s enthusiasm of the 1930s that takes recourse in the millennial folk culture with the idea to dissolve the devastating progress of human history in the extemporality and extraterritoriality of folk festivities: “Vast, unlimited, masses of forgotten meanings […] will be recalled, relived, in a renewed context and aspect. There is nothing absolutely dead; every meaning will experience the holiday of its rebirth” (Bakhtin, Estetika 373). 23  As Karen Barkey and Mark van Hagen put it: “In western Europe the process of nationbuilding went hand in hand with democratization, a constant, gradual, and always contested extension of the franchise. In the post-imperial settings, civil societies were either barely established or largely mimicked, while conservative, often aristocratic or corporatist, elites continued to rule. Whereas in western Europe, the process of nation-building can be seen as a product of continual negotiation between states and societies, in the states under consideration here the nation-building process was carried out largely from above with very little input from social groups and their institutions.” (Barkey and van Hagen 187) Accordingly, the East-Central European states inherited the so-called “bardic nationalism” (Trumpener 1998) from German Romanticism.

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trauma narrative that came into being after the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation in 1806.24 In the same way that the Schlegel brothers, in a frustrated anti-Napoleonic gesture, turned the long-term inferiority of German culture to its French counterpart into the German present and especially future superiority to it in their narrative, Hofmannsthal insists, in an embittered anti-Prussian gesture, on the superiority of the mobile Austrian culture over the restricted canon of Prussian values. Being located between multilingual peoples, the Austrian nation is irreducible to a rigid formula since it represents a broad synthesis of widely divergent forces (“Österreich” 22–23). It is an emergent and transforming entity, taking care to keep itself fluid (“Wir Österreicher” 392) and thus remain loyal to the original German mission of an incessant quest after oneself, which the contemporary Germans in the meantime had forgotten (“Deutschland und Europa”). However, Hofmannsthal’s adherence to cosmopolitan values offered resistance not merely to the contemporary German ethnic nationalism that was on the rise but, simultaneously, to his Austrian-Jewish compatriots who turned to this nationalism to rescue themselves from the antisemitism that accompanied it. Hofmannsthal’s manner of coming to terms with this peril was different. His relationship with German culture was, from the beginning, clearly determined by his Jewish descent. In Bohemia and Moravia, from where his grandparents came to Vienna in the 1820s, the Jews were representatives and promoters of German culture, especially those who engaged the German Enlightenment ideas to distance themselves from the religious fanaticism and communitarianism of the majority of their fellow Jewish citizens (the socalled Hasidim). They tended to completely assimilate into the corpus of progressive humanity by way of a relentless and systematic education. To recall Steven Beller’s point, “[t]he aim of the progressives in Austrian society was thus to destroy completely a separate Jewish identity” but, since they were as an outcome more educated than most of the Gentiles, “the very strategy of assimilation through Bildung was jeopardizing the acceptance of Jews in general, by making them something special again: no longer Jewish, but not really Gentile either” (Beller 139, 134). Hugo’s father, a rich and successful 24  In fact, the Holy Empire dissolved after the disastrous military defeats incurred in the Napoleonic Wars, which forced Francis II to replace Joseph II’s proactive idea of the Monarchy’s unity as the engine for reforms with defensive and conservative unity as the protector of peace (Judson, 97–102). In the long nineteenth century of rising nationstates (1879–1914), the Monarchy turned away from its orientation toward the middle strata as the agents of a progressive unity, gradually becoming a repository for the defeated aristocratic political ideas and social forces that advocated the status quo.

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trader (until the stock market crash in 1873) who strongly supported and attentively guided his son’s education, abandoned his Jewish origins by marrying a Catholic patrician’s daughter. Consequently Hofmannsthal was a carefully educated Catholic Viennese patrician who barely remembered his Jewish origins (Broch, Hofmannsthal und seine Zeit 73–74) but this was to unavoidably change under the pressure of rising Austrian antisemitism. The Jewish background that persisted in a “dimly unconscious” condition (80)—having been powerful, as in the case of Freud, probably precisely because of this vagueness (Beller 87)—suddenly became conscious by inducing that which Broch had described as a “two-stage narcissism” (Broch, Hofmannsthal und seine Zeit 80). This “mechanism of over-compensation” consists of preserving the previous inferiority complex (for being less German-Austrian than the others) in order to increase the joy at the compensation (for succeeding in the assimilation nonetheless): “[T]he assimilated perceives himself as a chosen one of a higher degree; he has been chosen from the chosen people” (80). That is to say, the pride at the once successful assimilation preserves the former situation of humiliation as the source of this pride’s perpetuation. This peculiar mechanism accounts for Hofmannsthal’s growing sympathy for the weak Austrians and Slavs against the strong Germans with whom he had more or less unconcernedly identified up until the wartime. In 1915 he composed the essay “The Noble Knight Prince Eugen” in which, to compensate for the bitter defeats of Austrian army in Serbia and Galicia, he glorifies the victorious Habsburg general Prince Eugen of Savoy (1663–1736). However, he needs the general to not only encourage his compatriots after their bitter losses but also to remind them of the general’s gracious command of the conquered Slavs. “These peoples, claims Hofmannsthal, even benefited from their bondage as he led them by his wise and skillful rule to the economic prosperity and a homogeneous community of peoples.” (Nodia 63) To strengthen his Jewish ‘rebellion of the weak’ as directed against the antisemitism that was on a continuous rise in his country from the 1880s, he identified allies among the various discriminated entities: the Austrians among the Germans and the Slavs among the Austrians. “The hostile attitude of the contemporary Viennese society towards the intellectuals of Jewish origin was analogous to the discrimination of the Slav peoples throughout Austria-Hungary” (54). As I have argued elsewhere, the dominated nations “display a strong interlocking inclination”, advocating “the right to self-determination of all nations put under similar assimilatory pressure” (Biti, Tracing 57). Hofmannsthal’s reaffirmation of the inferior Slav peoples, having been launched during the wartime, breaks with the Hofmannsthal family’s attachment to the German Enlightenment ideals of liberalism and education. By inventing the superior

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Austrian past, he resumes the manner in which German Romanticists, a century ago, had compensated for the German inferiority complex. Resisting the dominance of French culture throughout the eighteenth century, German Romanticists established self-empowering affinities with the other weak nations that opposed oppression. Following this thread, in the footsteps of Rudolf Pannwitz’s books The Crisis of European Culture (1917) and Germany and Europe (1918), Hofmannsthal was an enthusiastic reader of Herder who resolutely rejected the West European animosity toward the Slavs (Nodia 18–20). As the Slavs still live in the infantile, mythic phase of human history, they can help the riper European nations recall their childhood, rejuvenate and thus reintegrate themselves. In other words, the domination of German culture had to be maintained through a revitalizing appropriation of Slavic cultures. Hofmannsthal’s wartime and postwar Austro-Slavism thus epitomizes the so-called regenerative attitude to Eastern ‘barbarians’, which was introduced in the AustroHungarian Empire as a civilizing mission that had to compensate for the loss of the Austrian political hegemony in Germany after the defeat at Königgrätz in 1866. The suddenly eastward oriented Empire was increasingly presented as an unprecedented unity in diversity (Judson, The Habsburg Empire 317–328). In the frame of such “soft racism” committed to the affirmation of the racial other’s difference, as opposed to the “hard racism” oriented to its assimilation, ‘barbarians’ were permitted to integrate into humanity, yet only as members of marked or stigmatized groups (Amselle 7) called upon to continually ‘perfect’ themselves. They were thus recognized only as long as their supposed inferiority nurtured their masters’ feeling of superiority. Such a “paternal despotism,” celebrated by Marx and Engels as the best way to administrate the Slav “peoples without history,” is omnipresent in Austrian interwar literature when Hofmannsthal composed his Arabella (Kożuchowski 72–77). Among other tasks allocated to the Slavs, Hofmannsthal expected them to assist their West European masters in eliminating the horrible consequences of their steadily increasing control of nature, such as an unspeakable relativism, a questioning of all and everything, a caustic irony, an all-pervading criticism, a persistent doubting of language, and the taking of money as a supreme value (“Die Idee Europa” 48–49). Drawing on Slavic community-oriented cultures, the Austrian poet “awakens the primordial powers of the people […] something that is more important than individuals” by adjusting “all that is strange and irreconcilable in a human being” and by helping the “diversity and contradictions of the world” reestablish their lost unity (52, 50). Hofmannsthal therefore engages Slavic cultures to recuperate the obliterated imperial character of German culture and thus prevent its future disintegration. Whatever in these cultures endangers his project of communal harmony—all hard facts that

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disturb the therapeutic ideal made out of them—undergoes reckless elimination (Nodia 28). Fully ignored in their claim for national distinction, the Slavs are welcome only inasmuch as they enable the Austrian compensatory myth of the ‘proper’ German self. They are maybe as weak as the Jews in comparison to the Austrians, the Austrians in comparison to the Germans, and, ultimately, as the Germans had been on the eve of the nineteenth century in comparison to the French, but the sacrificial community composed of these weak entities with the aim of strengthening them does not amount to equality nevertheless. When Dorothea Schlegel, finding a shelter in Vienna after Napoleon’s triumphs over the Habsburg Empire at Austerlitz (1805) and Wagram (1809), accuses the French empire of the reckless oblivion of the past by seeking salvation in the preserved memories of the German imperial ruins along the Rhine, significantly, she carefully distinguishes these ruins from the “tartaric wild” ones along the Danube. As Fritzsche remarks, the “Danube is no longer contained in Schlegel’s opposition between German history and French empire, but is a more fundamental East-West divide between savagery and civilization, between oriental prehistory and the European refinement of historical form” (Fritzsche 95). Forced into exile by the same Napoleon, Germaine de Staël did much the same when she accused the French Emperor of not being a proper Frenchmen because he was born “on the island of Corsica, practically within Africa’s savage sway” (de Staël 138, quoted after Fritzsche 76). The community of the dispossessed that Schlegel and de Staël invoke reintroduces discrimination. We can therefore open up the following reading of Arabella in the same way as we did the reading of The Mask, i.e. point out the inevitable failure of the lyric comedy’s egalitarian claim. In spite of the remedial “community of the weak”, which this genre foreshadows, not all those that it regards as weak enjoy equal status. On the contrary, the community’s one weak constituency, in order to ensure its domination, puts at its service another of its weak constituencies. At the time he composed Arabella, Hofmannsthal could almost literally repeat Gustav Mahler’s famous sentence: “I am deprived of a homeland in a threefold sense: as a Czech among the Austrians, as an Austrian among the Germans, and as a Jew in the whole world” (Beller 207). As Hermann Broch has argued, he was from the outset educated for a “splendid isolation” in art, living a “dream within a dream”, detached from the fabulous Habsburg reality, which is why he was isolated in the world of beauty anyway (Broch, Hofmannsthal und seine Zeit 82–83). As the deteriorating Austrian antisemitism forced him into an ever deeper solitude,25 Hofmannsthal unremittingly tried to step out25  The rise of Austrian antisemitism in the two last decades of the nineteenth century is connected with the weakening and dissolution of the state-favored liberal creed, which

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side of his Jewish-Austrian-German self by attaching himself to a larger community of the deprived. Following this thread, the thesis I want to elaborate on in the following reads: Hofmannsthal’s growing feeling of homelessness drives not only Arabella’s characters into a series of transgressions from the traumatizing present society into an imagined remedial community but also, although more surreptitiously, its authorial agency. As regards the characters, Arabella’s parents, Count Waldner and his wife Adelaide, flee from the denigrating circumstances of their present into a world regulated by the “gambling and betting principle” (Schäfer 61). As an impoverished Austrian nobleman, compelled to rent a hotel apartment instead of owning a villa, Count Waldner plunges into a gambling passion, which, instead of solving his family’s problems, gives him an opportunity to forget about them. Although he does not figure so centrally in Arabella as the General’s Wife in The Mask, he does not fall behind her in his ability to eliminate anything that hinders his passion from his consciousness. Inasmuch as he immediately cancels all experiences from reality that could stop the blind repetition of his passion, his memory is as empty as hers; and he equally tends to turn all characters into his instruments (62–66). His superstitious wife, Adelaide, for her part, tries equally compulsively to reaffirm the expectations of her youth that were ruined by the sinister circumstances of her marriage. She hopes for salvation from the “superordinate powers, whose moods she tries to find out via the fortune-telling” (71). In short, like her husband, she puts everything on a bet, which gives the events the form of developments at a gaming table, exposed to the rule of chance (72). Guided by the impulse, greed and affect, the Waldner couple conducts an artificially intensified extemporal life, convulsively isolated from the grim historical atmosphere of the Empire’s military, political, and economic collapse.26 paternally protected the Jews. For the rise of populist politics at the turn of the century in the nationally enflamed Austria, see Schorske 116–180. As soon as German nationalism— more feverish in Austria than in Germany—based the German nation on the principle of descent, the Jews were excluded from it (Beller 161–162), which induced a series of antiJewish riots as well as the rise of racial antisemitism at the turn of the century. Hitler came to power just a few years after Hofmannsthal’s death in 1929. At the beginning of 1933, Nazis prohibited public performances of the Jewish authors’ operas and Richard Strauss, the author of the music for Arabella, decided to collaborate with them to rescue his halfJewish grandchildren (his son had married a Jewish woman). At the same time, however, Strauss continued his cooperation with Stefan Zweig, with whom he started to work after Hofmannsthal’s death (Zweig 418–425). 26  On the feeling of heightened contingency in the late Dual Monarchy and the attempts to overcome its pressure by the “fictions of order”, see Düllo 9–22.

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If both parents escape into the same alternative world, the alternative worlds of their daughters Zdenka and Arabella stand in contrast to one another. The only way for women to find their self-fulfillment in the Habsburg Empire was to look for appropriate men to be their future husbands.27 This already unpleasant fate is, in the case of Zdenka and Arabella, additionally aggravated by their family’s financial impasse. However, they have completely different starting positions for this predetermined search for a “woman’s fortune”. First of all, Zdenka’s parents coercively disguise her as a boy, Zdenko. According to her mother’s explanation, “We are not rich enough to take two girls down the path of life appropriately in this city” (Arabella 518), which is why she was forced to become a boy. Put under the family pressure to play a male role from her early youth onwards, she is trained to renounce her female aspirations and prospects by sacrificing herself for the fortunes of beloved persons (519). This is not so for Arabella who epitomizes a beauty to which all other characters refer, are fascinated with or are even paralyzed by. Unlike Zdenka, she does not need to forge “female intrigues”—in order to let herself be discovered as a woman— because Arabella’s beauty, as it were, acts for her. She only has to wait for a man who will not fall victim to the demonic “actress” (i.e. beauty) within her, in the stereotypical manner all other men do, but will self-confidently set her free from her “actress’s” odious masquerade. For her part, she expects this taming of the cold-blooded and calculated “witch” within her to happen through a direct exchange of glances without any pretension and questions: “Everything bright and open, like a bright river on which the sun is flashing!” (546). Having been conquered in such an instantaneous way, she undergoes transformation from the perilous destroyer of male lives into an obeying angel. Both sisters are therefore “divided personalities”;28 Zdenka as the “witch within the angel” in her external appearance and Arabella as the “angel within the witch” in the internal appearance. Both are in the expectance of men well equipped to turn their false appearances, as enforced by the social carnival of the age, into their true nature, that of devoted wives. As opposed to their parents, their transgression from the devastating Vienna carnival into the remedial alternative worlds relies not so much on the assistance of chance as that of the opposite sex. 27  Sophie states in Rosenkavalier (50): “He is a man, so he is what he is. But I first need a man to become what I am. So I am then very indebted to the man for that.” 28  For Hofmannsthal’s fascination with divided personalities as the modern internalization of the old comedy’s typical motive of interchange, see Schäfer 208–209. This fascination, epitomized in The Letter of Lord Chandos (1902), is of course another point of overlap with the forking and bifurcations of Crnjanski’s self, which, while deeply affecting The Mask, go much beyond it.

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If the Waldner parents feverishly try to exempt themselves from their humiliating life circumstances in the same way as their daughters strive to liberate themselves from their imposed roles—both generations of the once so proud Vienna aristocracy now significantly relying on unpredictable external ‘redeemers’!—the Croat Mandryka, being portrayed as a land owner who masters his possession in a sovereign manner, operates as their clear peripheral counterpart. He epitomizes a harmonious community which they, being drawn long ago into a highly differentiated and perplexing urban society, appear to be cut off from. The social whole they belong to escapes them entirely whereas Mandryka comfortably keeps it under his ‘fatherly’ control. He displays an almost aristocratic self-consciousness that not only tranquilly looks after his ‘inanimate’ possessions—the villages, fields, river and forest—but also his ‘animate’ belongings such as wild and domestic animals, his “four thousands subjects” (administrators, foresters, coalmen, hermits, gypsies, shepherds) and his three servants, the body-hussar (Leibhusar) Welko, the body-Gypsy (Leibzigeuner) Djura, and the body-Jew (Leibjude) Jankel, who all “prey for his happiness” (Arabella 536–537).29 The ethnic variety of Mandryka’s staff is of course not accidental but symbolizes the Monarchy’s peripheral or, more accurately, marginal populations. These “outcasts, however, are directly related to their lord as ‘servants of his body,’ and, by surrendering to him, performing everything he commands, they act as the executors of his will (…). This is how fairy-tale saves the outsiders …” (Schäfer 157), but, at least in Hofmannsthal’s view, also how the Empire treated its outskirts. Mandryka merely repeats the generous attitude that the paternal Emperor demonstrated toward the remotest imperial periphery.30 Thus, in the writer’s remedial back-projection launched out of the disintegrated and perplexed Austrian society, Mandryka’s organic community becomes the synecdoche of the (past) Empire, acquiring the traits of an idyllic family as carefully governed by a generous father who looks after all his children equally. Next to retrieving the people’s anchors and roots destroyed by the process of modernization, this utopia is designed to exempt individual and

29  Unlike Welko (whose name is borrowed from a famous folk legend about the brigand Welko), Djura and Jankel (whose names are borrowed from the Croatian “Wedding Song of the Gypsies”; Burkhart) get these attributes not in the comedy itself, but in Hofmannsthal’s correspondence with Richard Strauss (Strauss and Hofmannsthal 658). 30  He even speaks of the Emperor and Empress as if they were his parents. (Arabella 546) Like the Emperor’s, his whole world is rendered in familial terms.

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group identities from the perils of the incessant change and ruination.31 Since the foreigner is elevated to an extraterritorial and extemporal sphere, it is small wonder that nobody really knows his/her exact location, be it “Hungary or Wallachia …” (Arabella 525), “Sissek” (537) or “Slavonia” (545). Any such specification would eliminate the foreigner’s ‘threatening allure’ genuine of the ‘noble wildmen’ or ‘irrational infants’ (in both an ontogenetic and phylogenetic perspective, as investigated by psychoanalysis and the ethnology/anthropology of the time).32 To enable the therapy of the traumatized native self, these foreigners’ distinction must remain ambiguous, vague and indeterminate. Only if s/he is de-personalized, turned into a foggy stereotype, can s/he function as an inexhaustible source of “poetic productivity”, as German Romanticists, its inventors, have after all envisaged (Nodia 22).33 Indeed, Hofmannsthal describes his ‘poet,’ who is enduringly inspired by the foreigner’s ‘proximate remoteness,’ as being “there where he does not seem to be and always at another place than he is expected to be” (“Der Dichter” 66). Probably spontaneously but consistently following this Romanticist mystification that mobilizes the poetic phantasy, he depicts Mandryka’s appearance as being “undefinable provincial/rural” (undefinierbar Ländliches; Arabella 533). 31  The idea of an organic community goes back to German Romanticism and emerges as a defensive reaction to the growing differentiation of the society at the time, which was followed by an increasing feeling of disorientation and senselessness. It was first resumed in the same function by Marx and Engels in the 1840s and, thereafter, by the sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies in his work Community and Society from 1887. In short, the “discovery of society is the condition for the more exact profiling of the concept of community, inasmuch as it can now advance into a collective name for all that which cannot be subsumed in the concept of society” (Rosa et al. 37–38). The concept of the (organic) community is therefore, in the public domain, the result of the same resistance to modernization that, in the private domain, engenders the concept of the soul. Both are eminently antimodernist concepts introduced by the groups and individuals who found themselves dispossessed by the process of modernization. 32  In the series of his cultural-anthropological essays as launched with Totem and Taboo (1913/14) and closed with Moses and Monotheism (1939), Freud tried to unite these two perspectives. Next to psychoanalysis and anthropology, the political philosophy of the time (Ernst Renan, Gustave Le Bon, and Julien Benda, for example) displays a strong fascination with the ‘internally external’ foreigners as well. Walter Benjamin’s concept of the ‘proximate remote’ aura emerges in the same atmosphere. Hofmannsthal’s involvement with the ‘proximate remote’ foreigner has therefore to be interpreted within a broader ‘traumatic constellation’ of late imperial and post-imperial Europe. 33  While reinventing this exotic foreignness, Hofmannsthal drew on few biased written sources, as he had no firsthand knowledge whatsoever and did not care to acquire it or to differentiate his idea through the reading of further written sources for that matter.

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Being approachable only “in an indirect and negative way” (Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking” 146), Mandryka thus becomes—fully beyond his own or his community’s life design—a sort of Messiah, a savior not merely from the Waldner couple’s utilitarian perspective or Arabella’s emotional perspective, but also from Hofmannsthal’s political perspective that charts the desirable trajectory of Austrian identity-building. The ultimate effect of Mandryka’s intervention in the imperial center’s circumstances is that “the distant seems to be very close—and the close incredibly spiritualized” (“Gespräch in Saleh” 652), which means that the indigenous and the foreign gradually translate into a higher unity. Since this is what Hofmannsthal had ultimately envisaged, his exotic rendering of Mandryka in the final outcome “legitimates the limitlessness of [his] fantasy”. For him, the foreigner is merely an emanation of his self, a wishful projection unwilling to “tolerate any controversy with the foreign reality” (Nodia 25). The real parameters of the foreigner ought to undermine the power of the invented idea of him or her, which is why they are circumvented. In other words, opposing the so-called hard colonial attitude characterized by a consistent negation of the foreigner’s difference, Hofmannsthal advocates the late Habsburg ‘soft’ colonial attitude characterized by a stubborn reaffirmation of foreignness.34 By restating his or her difference, the foreign other enables the dispossessed native self—in this particular case Hofmannsthal’s Austrian-Jewish self—who never stops welcoming his or her otherness to repeatedly exempt himself or herself by way of it from his or her denigrating terms. This amounts to a peculiar reversal of roles because, firstly, the carrier of negation now becomes the other instead of the self and, secondly, unlike the self’s negation that annihilated the other, the other’s negation now revivifies the self. If we take a look at Julia Kristeva’s more recent revival of this sophisticated attitude to the foreigner—in terms of what she considers to be a ‘proper’

34  For the distinction between ‚hard’ and ‚soft’ colonialism see Biti, Tracing 15, 63. After the defeat at Königgrätz (1866) and the concomitant political and territorial losses in Western Europe, the Austrian empire launched a compensatory civilizing mission directed at its eastern and southeastern regions. Its liberal commitment to the perfectibility (by way) of different peoples intensified the expansion of the traffic and communicational infrastructure, the administrative and educational networks, cultural institutions and public architecture into these regions. The introduction of new services, duties and responsibilities under the ideological flag of “unity in diversity” that welcomes the other as a necessary enrichment to the self, enormously multiplied the points of interaction between the governmental institutions and the populations of these peripheries. This is how the so-called indirect imperial rule with its mechanisms of ‘capillary supervision’ (Foucault) entered the Habsburg political space. See Judson, The Habsburg Empire 317–328, and Cohen 2013.

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cosmopolitanism35—we can better understand why the desperately needed self-exempting operation of the dispossessed self, which this attitude gives rise to, amounts to an interminable project that turns the foreigner into a permanent condition of its possibility: Let us not seek to solidify, to turn the otherness of the foreigner into a thing. Let us merely touch it, brush by it, without giving it a permanent structure. […] … an acknowledged and harrowing otherness […] inscribed in an original play being developed, without goal, without boundary, without end. An otherness barely touched upon and that already moves away. Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves 3

Determined to function as a mystical mythomoteur of the native self—a laboratory of this self’s reinvention and recreation—the foreigner is thus enduringly dispossessed of a ‘proper’ (i.e. native) identity. As if confirming this, next to an almost imperial sovereignty that fuels the fantasy of the disintegrated urban self, Mandryka displays typically ‘wild’ or ‘barbaric’ characteristics genuine of the figure of the buffoon, with whom Hofmannsthal wishes to associate him. In his letter to Strauss from 27 November 1927, in which he points out such a profile to his figure, he describes Mandryka as a “half wild half tender—[an] almost demonic” young man (Burkhart 223).36 To be sure, in Habsburg times, the Croats were infamous for their wildness. One character in Rosenkavalier remarks that “The bodyguards of the Baron of Lerchenau are fully drunken and go off on our bodyguards twenty times more angrily than Turks and Croats!” (Rosenkavalier 58).37 Of course, when the Croats fought for the Monarchy as one of its loyalist constituencies, their wildness was, on the contrary, wellreputed (Benedikt 177). But beyond this collective reputation of his people, Mandryka is himself depicted as a rude and clumsy young man who behaves like a bear. During the handshaking at the beginning of Act Two, he squeezes Baron Waldner’s hand to the point of pain (Arabella 543). In a jealous anger, he 35  I have taken issue with Kristeva’s version of cosmopolitanism in Biti, Tracing 58–59, 78. 36  Let us recall that Crnjanski, in his introductory remarks, also associates his buffoon (Pierrot, who is in his turn a transformed Pagliaccio of the commedia dell’ arte) with the death. 37  In his letter to Strauss from 22 December 1927, Hofmannsthal indeed associates this Baron (who has the significant nickname Ox) with Mandryka (who could be easily nicknamed Bear). The task of both these slightly ridiculous figures is to introduce something refreshingly rural/provincial in the perverted world of Viennese salons.

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seizes an armchair so that its armrest crashes off (557). At one point, Arabella is frightened by his dull ferocity (545). His German is poor, he displays bad manners, behaves incredibly naïvely in the circumstances of Viennese society, and, from time to time, quotes Croatian folk songs. In sum, in the same way that the “witch” in Arabella has to be tamed in order for the “angel” in her to be liberated, this rough Slavonian ‘bear’ needs to be civilized in order for his intrinsic sovereignty to win the day. This is the task that Hofmannsthal allocates their romantic relationship—to help each other reach their ‘true’ selves. In such a way, he exempts their romantic relationship from the field of corrosive societal forces into the dream-world of an extemporal insular community based on its subjects’ emotional bond as well as submission to their Master.38 By forcing Mandryka to sublimate his rude behavior, Arabella uncovers the underlying aristocracy of his spirit; by forcing her to give up her artificial behavior, he discloses her hidden inner beauty. They pull each other out of their restricted worlds with the aim to acquire qualities that these worlds have prevented them from recognizing. In a sharp contrast to Crnjanski’s translating of the provisional human carnival into the divine eternal one that makes its masks irremovable, Hofmannsthal lets the provisional carnival’s ‘comedy of chances’ tear off the masks that were imposed on his characters by the enduring social carnival of their realities. A series of concatenated accidents, germane to the carnival’s mundus inversus, recovers the characters’ identity possibilities that were victimized by the naturalized (and therefore invisible) carnival of their respective societies. At the end everybody is relegated to his or her ‘proper’ place as commanded by the community’s ‘higher’ necessity:39 Mandryka back to Slavonia, as the periphery is the only area in which he can be really sovereign, and Arabella to a willing submission to her rich lord, as this is the only role that can satisfy a beautiful woman. 38  For the historically and socially induced sublimation of love into an asocial, dual relationship, see Luhmann, Liebe als Passion 115–116. For the close connection between this conceptualization of love and the idea of organic community, which dissolves all individuals in an ‘oceanic’ collective, see Rosa et al. 35. 39  This ‚necessity’ stems from what Paul Gilroy described as the typically imperial “ecological arrangement”: “each racial or ethnic type turns out to have its own space where it is at home and can be itself” (After Empire 55). Only such a proper location can discipline the wildness that underlies these types’ attractiveness. For the sake of illustration, in a letter sent on 17 May 1809 to his brother Wilhelm, Jacob Grimm compares fairy tales with wild animals: “If they were transported to the present they would lose their enchanted nature and simply walk around in a circle. The wildness of customs was preserved only by keeping them at a distance, in situ, in the past. The past was the place where the wild animals roamed” (Quoted after Fritzsche 153–154).

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Hofmannsthal for his part ends in a myth of an all-embracing human community, the only place that he trusted could reunite a writer with the people.40 Unfortunately, all myths end up rescuing some while annihilating others. Because the delineated transgressions into alternative worlds grew out of the characters’ and author’s particular dispossession, they could not make up for all dispossessions but spawned new ones instead. What Hofmannsthal regarded as the end of the one devastating carnival turned out to be the beginning of another one, characterized by new dispossessions.

40  In his essay on Egyptian Helen from 1928 Hofmannsthal designates the “mythological opera” as being the “truest of all (art) forms” because “our present” as the site of the “fusion of millennia” and the “Occident and Orient”, is “mythic” itself (“Ägyptische Helena” 512).

Chapter 5

Exempt from Belonging: Ivo Andrić, Karl Kraus, and Post-imperial Trauma Irrespective of the national literary historiography that undertakes it, the thesis of a belated realism figures prominently in the periodization of Ivo Andrić’s oeuvre. These misleading classifications, which were established by representatives of the three South Slav ‘national spirits’ to benefit their own ends, prevented the interpreters from discovering the connection between Andrić’s narratives and the ‘technologies of the self’ (Foucault, “Technologies”) genuine to post-imperial Europe.1 The breakup of European empires induced in many of their citizens, in the first place those who were steeped in multiple coexisting loyalties, an uncanny feeling of no-longer-being-at-home (which is what the Freudian Unheimliche, in fact, etymologically amounts to). In the new political settings, after the imperial supranational structures had disintegrated along with the institutions that protected them, the collective attempts to rescue the supranational collective identity were exposed to numerous risks, which confronted these citizens with the necessity to uncover new technologies of self-survival. In the following I shall deal with two writers, Karl Kraus and Ivo Andrić, who, inheriting their multiple belonging from the imperial time, confronted the reinvigorated imperative of belonging to one and only one nation in their new states.2 In addition to this, neither of these two post-imperial 1  Three South Slav national literary histories lay claim to Andrić’s work. The Serbian literary historian Jovan Deretić places Andrić’s work into a period that saw a return to traditional narrative forms (350–351). He interprets Andrić as a historian rather than a novelist, including him in Serbian literature’s mainstream that is, allegedly, history oriented. The Croatian literary historian Krešimir Nemec claims that Andrić synthesized the narrative methods of the classic realist novel (200), confirming, as he reads it, the principal characteristic of the Croatian novel: a tendency toward the assimilation and integration of heterogeneous traditional sources (83–84, 196). The Bosnian-Herzegovinian literary historian Dejan Đuričković claims that Andrić opposed modernist poetics in order to maintain a claim to totality, supposedly typical of the Bosnian-Herzegovinian novel (41). 2  They were already late empires, which in the last decades of the nineteenth century classified and categorized their diverse populations, expecting individuals to belong to one and only one ethnic, racial and national group (Anderson 163–185). This was also the case in the Austrian part of the Dual Monarchy after 1867 and even more so at the outset of the twentieth century: “The growing tendency to stress the sense of belonging to the ethnic group at

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states were completely at home “in the process of establishing nation-states and reducing the national identity to one nation and one religion,” (Foteva 102) which was advocated by the Western European states. Both had inherited the Western European modern idea of nation via the German imperial adjustment, which represented a compromise between the Western European modern and East-Central European pre-modern political heritage. Of course, “by the time they become operating forces,” i.e. about a century later, Austria and Yugoslavia “were at least twice removed from their western models” (Sugar 13). It is their peculiar hovering in-between the empire and nation-state, which follows from this state of affairs, that set the stage for the meandering identity politics characteristic of both Kraus’s and Andrić’s work.3 the expense of the sense of citizenship turned even more sinister when ethnic attribution was taken away from the will and choice of individual persons and transferred to the decision of public authorities on the basis of so-called ‘objective evidence’ ” (Stourzh, “Ethnic Attribution” 81). Through such an essentialization, the other gradually became an enemy who was necessary in order to unify the fragmented ethnic self (Wingfield 1–2). On the other hand, the Hungarian part of the Monarchy had been established on the ethnic principle from the very beginning. By explaining its 1868 nationality law, Count Stephan Tisza declared all nationalities living in Hungary to be parts of an “indivisible Hungarian Nation”: “Our citizens of non-Magyar tongue must, in the first place, become accustomed to the fact that they belong to the community of a national state, of a state which is not a conglomerate of various races” (cited in Stourzh, “Multinational Empire” 15). In the newly established East-Central European nation-states, however, the ethnic principle became not only the state fundament but a widely disseminated instrument of everyday orientation. 3  That is to say, in line with the traditional European empires’ policies, both Austria and Yugoslavia “thwarted the emergence of modern national identities in the name of multinational or transnational harmony, while making still enough concessions to the national principle in other spheres to encourage the rise of anti-state national movements” (Barkey and van Hagen 185). Their ethnic groups did not lose their individuality and distinctiveness but were expected to behave responsibly toward their common heritage, which was obviously fundamentally distinct in Austria with its legacy of domination and Yugoslavia with its legacy of being dominated (Barkey 104). Since only such a historical and cultural background, despite its enormously different weight in Austria and Yugoslavia, kept their ethnicities together, they were expected to constantly reaffirm it in their local daily actions. Following Jozsef von Eötvös’ and Ernest Renan’s concept of “shared heritage” as the very core of national feeling, Katherine Arens places its incessant refreshing, reworking, and renegotiating at the basis of the meandering identity politics characteristic of the Habsburg political and cultural space. Claudio Magris famously dubbed this indecisive maneuvering back-and-forth in an atmosphere of a prolonged termination a “squeamish muddling through” (zimperliches Fortwursteln; Magris 29–31). (Arens 1996) However, Arens seems to forget, or at least to downplay how such a construction of the supranational imagined community through the institutions of the Habsburg late imperial and post-imperial age—as exemplified in the

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This ‘itinerant’ self-fashioning that characterizes Andrić’s most distinguished characters and in particular his narrator comes into being as a reflex of, and through a persistent dialogue with, the two Yugoslav states’ endeavors to construct a supranational discursive identity in the multicultural (post-) post-imperial surrounding. Today, we know that these concatenated attempts (as launched by the first and second Yugoslavia) to resume the late Habsburg supranational legacy by combining the imperial ‘regressive’ with the nationstates’ ‘progressive’ strategies, proved to have been all but successful.4 But this does not mean that we are therefore better advised to ignore them as if they had never existed or as if they are forever gone. In the age of globalization, quite on the contrary, the nation-states appear to be antiquated while the imperial legacy experiences its triumphant revival. As Alexander Motyl put it: “Although the international sources of empire have declined in importance, the internal sources are not only present, but, arguably, have assumed greater salience. And because empires can emerge silently” via territorial expansion, regime change, elite formation, and societal transformation taking place in the nation-states, “they should continue to exist in everything but name for some time to come” (Motyl 25). Irrespectively of how we estimate the prospects of this silent and ongoing negotiation between empires and nation-states today, we are certainly obliged so-called Kronprinzenwerk—surreptitiously fostered its national compartmentalization. (Bendix 2003). As Robert Donia put it with regard to the Habsburg Bosnia and Herzegovina that was taken as the model for the constitution of socialist Yugoslavia (Foteva 102): “/S/ecular education, far from churning out local followers of the regime, incubated resentment of colonialism and spawned revolutionary intellectuals who turned to radical European ideologies for their inspiration” (Donia 88). By resuming this imperial model socialist Yugoslavia continued to raise vipers in its own bosom. This hesitant compromise between the nationstate’s unification and imperial compartmentalization—Yugoslavia even maintained the Ottoman millet category of the Bosnian Muslim identity—once again proved to be lethal. On the rise of the disintegrating forces in the project of Yugoslavia as launched by the victorious allies in Versailles, see Stråth 389. He points out a huge difference between the Habsburg imperial tradition (as materialized in Slovenia and Croatia) and the Ottoman imperial tradition (as materialized in Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia, and Kosovo) with Bosnia and Herzegovina in-between; Serbia took on the role of Piedmont in Italy’s unification, Slovenia that of Lombardy in Italy’s modernization; Ljubljana gravitated towards Vienna, Zagreb toward Budapest, and Belgrade, which was industrialized by means of French capital, toward Paris; Croatia opposed Serbian centralization, but Slovenia supported it to defend itself from the Italian expansion, etc. 4  Sabrina P. Ramet, of course, justifiably speaks about three Yugoslavias (the first from 1918– 1945, the second from 1945–1991, and the third from 1991–2003) but Andrić died in 1975, which spared him of the third one.

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to recognize its stakes in the past. As soon as we exempt Andrić’s work from retroactive national kidnappings and instead interpret it as a constituent of this broader historical-political constellation that challenges all-too-restrictive notions of ethnic belonging, it acquires a completely new configuration and relevance.5 The following analysis is intended to recalibrate and refine the identity-building in Andrić’s work by making it less amenable to the wishful back-projections launched out of the fortified one-national presents. I interpret such biased usurpations as defensive gestures of national collectives who find themselves imperiled by what they experience as messy, turbulent and hostile environments and concomitantly try to consolidate and stabilize their own position at any price whatsoever. However, unilateral national appropriations of Andrić’s oeuvre do not solve its multiple ethnic, religious, and cultural loyalties but disregard them, which turns them into embittered political instruments rather than considerate and balanced arguments. By acting in such a partisan manner, they miss the subtle and complex operations that were engaged by Andrić’s narrative in its coping with ominous developments that loomed large on the horizon of the writer’s time.

The Bridge over the Drina

Starting with Andrić’s most famous and most frequently discussed novel, The Bridge over the Drina, one can hardly overlook how its composition displays a striking imbalance. Three and a half centuries of Ottoman rule over Bosnia and Herzegovina are fitted into just eight out of the twenty-four chapters deal, while the remaining sixteen chapters are dedicated to a mere thirty-five year period of Austrian administration. As this blatant asymmetry indicates, Andrić’s main concern is to unravel the transition from one civilizational pattern to the other rather than simply present the historical happenings around the bridge. The Yugoslav ‘brotherhood and unity’ ideology imposed the reputation of being a bridge-builder between the South Slav peoples and cultures upon this writer that, as if by default, has accompanied him through to the present day but his real stake in this novel is exactly the opposite. The Bridge over the Drina shows how Austrian civilization gradually ruined Ottoman heritage until, ultimately, it even destroyed the bridge as its most valuable symbol. Following this thread, Ana Foteva summarized the novel as follows: “The story 5  Magris mentions Andrić as the Habsburg space’s typical writer but does not analyze his work whatsoever (14). The recent attempt of Ana Foteva to read Andrić along these lines is much more elaborated and instructive.

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of the bridge on the Drina is one of a failed attempt to heal a personal [i.e. Mehmed Pasha’s] trauma and to bridge over differences [between the West and the East]” (130). In other words, the Austrians introduced a new type of imperial administration that replaced the Ottoman model and the novel recognizes no continuity between them. In his Discipline and Punish, Foucault explained this transition as a shift from sovereign to disciplinary power. Although Andrić describes both imperial administrations meticulously, including their consequences for the population’s everyday life, this seems to have completely eluded the attention of his critics, with the exception of an important hint in Zoran Milutinović’s recent reading (205–260).6 This is astonishing because Andrić primarily represents the sovereign Ottoman power through its brutal public spectacles, which perfectly matches Foucault’s definition. We find several such manifestations in the novel but two are foregrounded: the so-called blood tax, i.e. the violent abduction of small boys from the imperial provinces from their parents in order to raise them as elite Ottoman troops, and the execution by impalement of a rebel against the Empire. The novel’s critics have usually attributed this cruelty to despotic Eastern rule, as opposed to the humanity of Western administrations, but this is a further stereotype, apparently nourished by a hatred towards the ‘Turks’ that is found within the South Slav (especially Serbian) cultural tradition. After Foucault, public executions accompanied by the torture and mutilation of the rebel’s body characterized all empires, including Western ones. Not only was confession extorted from the perpetrator’s body through violent means in the Ottoman Empire, as is the case in the novel, but also in Western societies, whereupon the body was exposed to public torture as the sovereign’s response to threats against his own body, i.e. the empire. Foucault cautions that the scenario envisaged by this public spectacle of sovereign power can fail if its participants disobey, i.e. deny recognition, and it is exactly this that happens in the novel, turning the demonstration of power into a source of unrest and rebellion. This, in its turn, effectuates the containment of the despot’s autocracy, which in the novel paves the way for the transition to a new, disciplinary type of penal law. The brutal kind of sovereign power, therefore, by no means characterizes Eastern regimes alone. The Habsburg Empire, for example, decapitated the bodies of two seventeenth century conspirators against the Emperor, Petar Zrinski and Fran Krsto Frankopan. The public executions of these traitors compared with the mere imprisonment of the assassinator Gavrilo Princip two and 6  Milutinović analyzes both The Bridge over the Drina and Bosnian Chronicle. In describing this transition, however, he uses the categories of the German sociologist Max Weber rather than Foucault’s ones that are, in my opinion, more pertinent.

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a half centuries later testifies to a reform of the imperial penal law in the second half of the nineteenth century. As if considering this, and contradicting the reception of his critics, Andrić does not represent the two types of imperial rule over Bosnia and Herzegovina in such a way to expose the first type to sharp condemnation and the second to approval in his novel. Generally, his sophisticated narrative technique resists such cheap moral oppositions prevalent to the affective consumption of so-called lovers of literature.7 As we have seen, the cruel type of Ottoman power undergoes ‘humanization’ in the novel whereas the disciplinary type of Austrian power is not nearly as human as it presents itself as being. Like the Ottoman type, it is portrayed via its most characteristic manifestations: public announcements, a census, the establishment of the administration and the police, conscription, introduction of a water supply, railways, banks, stock exchanges, newspapers, barracks, casinos and brothels. This systematic ‘civilizing’ of Bosnia and Herzegovina, based on the invisible network of laws, regulations and provisions that cover not solely humans but also animals, things, cities, and villages by penetrating into established customs and habits, confronts the population’s resistance. Although the Ottoman cruelty and robbery is over, the ‘capillary’ normative surveillance reduces and constrains individual liberties, classifies, reshapes and disciplines subjects, proliferating their duties and obligations to the edge of the absurd. Leisure is replaced by a feverish activity that becomes an end in itself, spawning devastating consequences. Ultimately, as a place of collective memory, the bridge itself is blown up by explosives as it does not underlie the planned exploitation and profit increase. Focusing on the shift from sovereign to disciplinary imperial rule, The Bridge over the Drina displays the same skepticism toward historical progress as its modernist novelistic predecessors, such as Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness. The novel was written during the Second World War as the terrible outcome of the “disciplined” post-imperial age in which state sovereignties run amok. This is why its settling of accounts with that age takes its cue from its genre predecessors located in colonial settings. The civilization of the wilderness of imperial provinces faces embarrassment and failure in both cases, because the 7  See the following ironic commentary from Andrić’s Signs by the Roadside that can be taken as the credo of the narrator’s behavior: “Moral outrage because of other peoples’ flaws, which completely screens similar shortcomings in us, enables us to take the strict and sublime attitude of a judge and victim at the same time, inducing a state of moral euphoria in us” (Znakovi 102). As we will come to see, instead of being such a biased judge embittered by his or her former victimhood, Andrić’s narrator wants to be a sublime divine agency characterized by an absolute understanding.

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greed for knowledge is just a disguised form of greed for power. Both emerge out of the insatiable drive to subject the other to one’s objectives. In the wake of such resilience by the modernist novel to the disciplinary society that creates greedy subjects, Andrić bereaves his work of two key attributes of the realist novel as an exemplary instrument of such a society. These are the hero and the plot. The novel is deliberately left without a goal-oriented hero who turns his life into a steady progression toward sovereignty. The figure of the Galician Jew Lotika, admittedly, leaves the impression of such life design but she is forced to take command over her destiny by an unfortunate coincidence of circumstances; moreover she is a female in a world which only envisages sovereignty for males. This ‘perverted’ state of affairs indicates that she has not chosen her life trajectory herself. And the point that this novel makes is that nobody does. In the reception of Andrić’s work, such fatalism was usually attributed to his ‘Oriental’ mentality but if we consider that works by prominent Austrian writers such as Hofmannsthal and Roth also display it, the thesis of Andrić’s Orientalism amounts to a stereotype similar to the attribution of brutality exclusively to the Ottomans.8 Hofmannsthal, for instance, repeatedly insists that human life obeys ineffable destiny (Schäfer 72–73). Structuring the comedy genre almost in the medieval, Dantean sense of the word, he suggests that an invisible divine power masks itself into the figures in order to reveal through them its unalterable conditions (Schäfer 221, 241). Roth, for his part, develops his “semantics of contingency” by allowing his figures’ life projects to be distorted by chance, allocating them a completely different course from that which they had envisaged (Düllo). Even Miloš Crnjanski, the Habsburg Serbian writer, firmly enmeshed in the Weltschmerz atmosphere and without any ‘Oriental’ life experience, highlights the rule of the “comedian chance” in the shaping of his figures’ life trajectories (Crnjanski 74).9 In accordance with this post-imperial ‘melancholy’ regarding human destiny, instead of designing characters that by calculated self-governance achieve sovereignty over the others, as realist novelists used to do, Andrić exposes his characters to the whimsical mechanisms of an anonymous rule over their lives. Not masters anymore, they are toys of their destinies, whose life paths are charted in the faraway imperial centers. With the emergence of the modernist novel, people irretrievably lost confidence in the ideology of man as the ruler of history, if, that is, they had ever had it in this remote European region. The subdued peripheral atmosphere in The Bridge over the Drina is reminiscent of 8  The ‘engineer’ of this influential thesis was the Serbian writer and critic Isidora Sekulić. 9  For a reading of Crnjanski’s entire oeuvre in the melancholic key of human life as a pure toy in chance’s hands, see Milošević.

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that in another famous ‘river-based’ novel, Naipaul’s A Bend in the River, although this takes place in a ‘liberated’ African country (probably Zaire under Mobutu) whereas Andrić’s work is set in an occupied Southeast European one. This is because the non-European postcolonial and the European post-imperial region not only overlap in terms of the disjunctive temporalities of modernity (Bhabha, The Location of Culture 236–237; Appadurai 1997), in the sense that modernity turns out to be the master’s meal and the slave’s poison, but also coincide in terms of ‘liberations’. In both postcolonial and post-imperial settings, instead of compensating for the subordination to the former masters, the ‘liberators’ prove to be just as merciless toward the population. Andrić’s novel, firstly, depicts the Austrians as a kind of liberator from the Ottomans and, secondly, comes into existence in 1942, after the South Slav liberator from the Austrians, i.e. the Yugoslav monarchy, experienced its own bitter capitulation. As empires approach their end, their centers are no longer in command of important decisions but are instead pushed into the contingent set of circumstances of the emergent world history. Andrić is a writer of the uprooted human condition following the Great War in which nobody really knows where s/he belongs, since this now depends on an elusive, constantly shifting global perspective.10 The subjects of the former post-imperial provinces, placed as they were at the crossroads of various political and economic interests, especially turn into victims of the identity patterns’ consecutive shifts. The permanent state of exception genuine to these transit zones tears them out of their old affiliations and pushes them into new ones. In the shaky EastCentral European post-imperial space in which the fragile new nation-states prove unable to govern themselves, it would be unrealistic to expect their individual members to bear responsibility for their own lives. Very little depends on their personal preferences and initiatives and very much on the contingent distribution of global forces. Such a disoriented condition of enduring turbulence activates the biding and reluctant ‘technologies of the self,’ placed not so much at the service of authentic life as the ideal of the European political 10  This unmooring of determinate belonging is a general feeling among post-imperial intellectuals. Let me for example reiterate Hofmannsthal’s statement that “the nature [Wesen] of our age is ambiguity [Vieldeutigkeit] and indeterminacy. It rests only on the slippery [dem Gleitenden] […] A slight chronic dizziness vibrates in it.” (“Der Dichter” 60) Or also repeat Walter Benjamin’s famous description of the completely erased prewar experience of the Great War generation that suddenly found itself standing “in the open air in a landscape in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds, and in the center, in a force field of destructive currents and explosions, the tiny frail human body” (291). These and following translations from German, Russian and Serbian texts are my own unless otherwise specified.

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agencies, but rather hibernation genuine to their suppliers.11 Following the famous Bartleby principle of the minimal freedom of decision (“I would prefer not to”), it deactivates the executive power of material reality in favor of the postponed utopian world (Agamben 1999). No past and present option is forever excluded but rather saved for this imagined future. Like Paul Klee’s figure of Angelus Novus from Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History”, which turns his face toward the past and his back toward the future, this postimperial intellectuals’ utopian world is committed to their enslaved ancestors rather than their liberated grandchildren. No single thing from the past, no matter how minor it presently appears, is permitted to fall into oblivion. As the ‘conservative revolutionary’ Hofmannsthal put it in a manner that significantly recalls his younger contemporary Mikhail Bakhtin, the task of the language is to express “that which does not exist anymore, which does not exist yet, which could be, but in the first place that which never happened, the sheer impossible and therefore beyond all real” (“Wert und Ehre” 132). Language is a “huge, fathomlessly profound empire of the dead, which is why we receive from it the highest life”.12 11  Menasse, for example, describes Austrian life experience as a prolonged “state of termination”—the old cannot die and the new cannot be born—which induces typical indecisiveness and hesitation in the relationship between the past and present (6–23). 12  Elaborating on his notes from the end of 1930s, Bakhtin similarly concluded in the treatise “Toward the Methodology of Human Sciences” from 1974: “Vast, unlimited, masses of forgotten meanings participate in each particular moment of the dialogic development, but at the given moment of the dialogue’s later course they will be recalled, relived, in a renewed context and aspect. There is nothing absolutely dead; every meaning will experience the holiday of its rebirth” (Estetika 373). Both Hofmannsthal and Bakhtin, replying to the radical revolutions of their time that aimed at the final political liberation of a future agency, work out the counter-project of a “conservative revolution” (Hofmannsthal, “Das Schrifttum” 37, 41) that aims at the continuous ethical binding to the silenced subordinates from the past. Polemicizing against the strong messianic program of the contemporary social democracy orientated toward an ultimate “glorious day”, Benjamin designated his own program as “weak messianic” (“Über den Begriff der Geschichte” 252). By spontaneously taking up this consistent commitment to the victims by Hofmannsthal, Bakhtin and Benjamin, Andrić, in a way, acted as the “chronic” from Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History” who lets “nothing that ever happened” go unnoticed by history (“Über den Begriff der Geschichte” 252). Any trifle might prove to be important for the final account yet to come. By proceeding in accordance with this meticulously preserving orientation typical of some prominent intellectuals of the post-imperial successor states, Andrić resolutely rejected, in a kind of traumatic abnegation of his activist youth, the radical options advocated by these intellectuals’ antagonists. Weak as his messianism was, it systematically bracketed out the ‘final solution’ associated, in the so-called strong

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As far as Andrić is concerned, this philosophy of social survival that does not trust progress and always keeps an eye on its past, forgotten and discarded options finds its breeding ground in the long experience of “in-betweenness”, accumulated in the imperial transit zones over the course of centuries.13 To illustrate, under Ottoman and Habsburg rule, the Bosnian Muslims were attached to Istanbul, the Orthodox to Montenegro and Serbia and the Catholics to Hungary, Venice, Austria and Zagreb, thus developing what Du Bois dubbed “double consciousness” in the colonial context (Foteva 93).14 From the second half of the eighteenth century, for example, the Habsburg Monarchy, while granting imperial citizenship (Staatsbürgerschaft) to all its inhabitants, required that each citizen have a Heimat, i.e. a ‘homeland’ in which his birth was registered in the parish records. Through such a measure, the imperial belonging was systematically divided (Judson, The Habsburg Empire 77). In the late imperial context, this in-betweenness manifested itself as the challenging of affiliation (or loyalty) to the state through affinity (or emotional attachment) to a homeland, either internal or external.15 The citizens of the subordinate imperial constituencies were accordingly torn apart between the belonging and longing. In his activist youth during the Habsburg rule of Bosnia, Andrić prematurely seized the opportunity to translate his affinity to the South Slav linguistic and cultural identity (an attachment that came to expression when he joined the revolutionary movement Young Bosnia) into an affiliation to the South Slav political entity that loomed large on the horizon. Yet, somehow, the disaggregating Empire still managed to punish his youthful adventure with messianism, with the ultimate Messiah’s arrival. In accordance with Wittgenstein’s main guideline, “[t]he sense of the world must lie outside the world” (Tractatus 6.41), he placed this sense beyond the limited criteria of worldly proof but operated, meanwhile, as its mediator. 13  This category was introduced by Homi K. Bhabha in “Culture’s In-Between” with regard to a (post)colonial setting but fits the (post)imperial one very well too. 14  For further instructive elaboration of this category, see Gilroy’s following remark: “Double consciousness emerges from the unhappy symbiosis between three modes of thinking, being, and seeing. The first is racially particularistic, the second nationalistic in that it derives from the nation state in which the ex-slaves but not-yet-citizens find themselves, rather than from their aspiration toward a nation state of their own. The third is diasporic or hemispheric, sometimes global and occasionally universalist” (The Black Atlantic 127). 15  For the latter very useful category, see the convincing and elaborate argumentation in Brubaker (Nationalism reframed 1–10). In the earlier imperial context, on the contrary, lower social strata were emotionally attached to the central power that protected them from the tyranny and pressure of local authorities (Judson, The Habsburg Empire 38). Although taking another form, the in-betweenness persevered.

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three years’ harsh imprisonment. After this attempt to turn a subversive longing into an official belonging sorely failed, he reactivated the imperial hibernating technique of keeping them apart in order to prevent this pain’s return. This enforced hibernation spawned Andrić’s weak messianism. The bifurcating technology of the provincial imperial selves, however, underwent an important transformation in post-imperial circumstances. The new nation-states not only reconfigured the asymmetry between the firm affiliation of the ruling constituencies to their state and the attachments of the subordinate ones to their “external homelands”, but put both identity patterns on harsh trial. Minorities felt endangered by the majority’s nationalism, the majority felt endangered by the minorities’ resistance to their unification project. This deepened the fear from identity dissolution on both sides, transforming both the rulers’ conservative affiliation and the subordinates’ subversive affinity into embittered national attachments. Faced with such ominous East-Central European developments, Andrić, who bitterly experienced their consequences, creates a narrative technique that systematically disengages affective investments on both sides. He establishes a meandering narrative perspective that prevents both affiliation to a given state and affinity to a remote homeland from smoothly translating into fierce allegiances. Exempting himself from any such belonging, his novelistic narrator repeatedly lets his affinity to one character or community deactivate his affiliation to another character or community. Thus eliminating the goal-oriented plot, he launches a neverending identity search through the consecutive testing and disengagement of various identity designs. But the imperial selves’ bifurcating technology undergoes transformation not only in the new nation-states but the multinational successor states too. Whereas “double consciousness” in the imperial circumstances characterized, in the first place, the provincial selves, in the post-imperial successor states some prominent intellectuals such as Benjamin, Hofmannsthal and Bakhtin, who for one reason or another do not fully belong to these states’ central constituency,16 find themselves captured by a state of divided belonging. 16  In the cases of Benjamin and Hofmannsthal this was their Jewish cultural background while for Bakhtin’s it was his multilingual and multicultural Lithuanian origin as well as his (in the new context inappropriate and unwelcome) religiousness. It is true that preserving ethical values by taking them out of the antagonized political sphere was primarily a Jewish project, but the Jews certainly cannot claim a monopoly on it. In fin-de-siècle Vienna, gentiles were usually drawn to Jewish ideas from certain aspects of their background that paralleled those of the Jewish background. As a rule, the common denominator was the uneasiness induced by their hyphenated identity (for example, Hermann Bahr

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Although politically affiliated to their new states, they feel culturally and ideologically affined to the deceased imperial spirit, which stimulates them to exempt themselves from their given surrounding by treating it as a mere transit station on the way to a redeemed humankind. In opposition to the central constituency’s representatives that adhere to their national identity, these ‘hybrid’ intellectuals advocate a persistent self-exemption from it in order to make the central constituency ‘imperially’ comprehensive and hospitable. Countering its self-enclosed nationalism, they endorse its continuous enrichment by the subordinate constituencies.17 Even though Andrić’s Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes was not a successor state in the same sense as Benjamin’s Germany, Bakhtin’s Soviet Union and Hofmannsthal’s Austria, it was nevertheless multinational and its Serbian central constituency, like those of the German, Russian and Austrian multinational states, had two principal options for relating to its other constituencies. As Andrić was no less ‘hybrid’ than Benjamin, Bakhtin and Hofmannsthal (he was a peculiar mixture of Croatian, Bosnian and Serbian components), he adhered to their conception of the central constituency’s sacrifice of its own distinct identity for an indistinct commonality-to-come.18 In contrast to postwar Germany and Austria, in which this conception was banished into opposition, the postwar Yugoslavia officially proclaimed its rule even if its Serbian central constituency, entering pragmatic compromises with the nationalists in its own ranks, did not hesitate to betray it. Andrić’s messianic orientation was based on long-term ethics rather than the politics of “rational choices” and “short-term interests” (Hanson xix), which is why his meandering narrative technique in The Bridge over the Drina consistently follows the above delineated self-exempting strategy. Let us formulate it as “I am affiliated to the present state of discrimination but affined to the past multinational, multiconfessional and multicultural empire.” This steady resilience to any discrimination is why his narrator repeatedly lets his affinity to the comprehensive past disengage his affiliation to the compartmentalized was a German Silesian, and Adolf Loos a German Moravian outsider in Vienna) (Beller 239–240). 17  For the defense of the liberal aesthetical and ethical values from the political mass movements’ vulgarization, see Schorske 3–24 and in particular Beller 207–237. For the diversification of Austrian responses to the Habsburg Empire’s breakdown and the situation of the Austrians in the established Vielvölkerstaat, see Kożuchowski (23–65). 18  In the case of Vienna Jews, this sacrifice consisted of making themselves invisible “men without qualities”, which, according to Kraus, were fated to dissolve entirely into their surrounding cultures and nevertheless still to remain a ferment (of negation) in them (Beller 217). Andrić undertook a similarly self-renouncing and all-embracing mission.

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present. Already in the first ‘synoptic’ chapter that summarizes the past developments around the bridge from the present vantage point, the narrator’s view of the bridge is mediated either by collective myths and legends or a naïve infantile perspective, which makes it polyphonic and ambiguous rather than unison and reliable. Myths and legends, such as the one about the rebel Radisav from the third chapter or the other one about the flood from the fifth chapter, represent the perspective of local communities that subverts the official imperial narratives imposed from above (Foteva 124). Nevertheless, the commonality that these myths create is neither all-embracing nor enduring, firstly because it is directed against the foreign conqueror, and secondly because it is regularly induced by an exceptional state that ends with the return to the regular state of mistrust and tension between communities. The narrator therefore identifies neither with myths nor narratives but questions one through the other. This skepticism toward any logical narrative construction of essentially contingent human affairs explains why The Bridge is not a historical novel but a chronicle, in which great history is, as it were, parenthesized. Put in Hegelian terms, Andrić’s narrator defends the arbitrary ‘prose of the world’ from the higher necessity of ‘world history’.19 His choice of the chronicle leaves the impression of an almost strategic return to the premodern human as a bystander to predesigned earthly occurrences. It strikes us as a wise retirement into a disinterested contemplation from the time of empires after his interested investment in the state-political solutions was brutally sanctioned. Yet was this really a wisdom, considering that in the modern world’s contingent condition no wisdom can justifiably claim the comprehensiveness that it possessed in premodern times when humans, guided by their emperors, putatively acted in accordance with a divine world design? The prevalent contingency of human affairs no longer trusts the providence’s self-appointed pastors. The weak messianic confidence in the existence of an ultimate Subject That Knows, wherever such faith emerges in the modern world, instead testifies to the trauma of an enforced absence from participation in it. After the breakdown of empires, post-imperial Europe suddenly turned provincial in comparison with Western Europe. In the same way as post-imperial Europe lagged considerably behind Western Europe, its South-Eastern parts lagged 19  Ranajit Guha sees the literature’s mission precisely in this alternative representation of the past, particularly when it comes to the literatures of the “non-historical” peoples which were despised and rejected by the Western colonizers upon their arrival (75–94). In such a way, these peoples disappropriate their expropriating appropriation not only by the foreigners but also domestic elites that profit from embracing the imported pattern of world history (49).

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behind its North-Western parts. No province, and especially not the double one that Andrić belonged to, chooses a contemplating attitude to life but rather is sentenced to it. To alleviate this tragic fate, it transforms it into a sign of divine grace. Accordingly, instead of bringing his narrator an all-embracing wisdom, Andrić’s renewal of the premodern genre of the chronicle at the heart of the modern novelistic genre denudes the wound of his provincial banishment. The putative accord with the divine world design that he believes to have earned in this way offers this narrator the therapeutic illusion of his ability to reconcile the conflicting individual and group perspectives. This pretentious conviction, that he is somehow authorized to redeem the humankind-to-come, encourages him to gradually replace his distance toward these individuals and groups’ blind spots with the tolerant gesture of understanding and including all of them. Nothing must be pushed into oblivion. If particularity is in their hands, universality is in his; if they have already established their distinctive identities, his is on the way to its all-encompassing constitution through the assimilation of theirs. Concerning this silent transition from the secessionist to the mentoring identity formation that characterizes the path from the young Andrić to the adult Andrić, it has passed somewhat unnoticed that the narrator of this novel, as well as the narrator of the later novel The Damned Yard (Prokleta avlija), uses the Ekavian literary standard whereas the local figures’ everyday speech is, as a rule, Ijekavian (Foteva 122). Andrić has knowingly followed the Yugoslav unitary ideology, according to which the Ekavian was not simply one of the South Slav standards but rather was allocated the caretaking mission of uniting the dismembered South Slav language users, i.e. the Ijekavian ones in the Bosnian and Croatian variants. Accordingly, Ekavian was considered to be not so much the carrier of a distinctive Serbian national identity but the nationally indistinctive fatherly host of all South Slav national identities. If Andrić implements it in this capacity in The Bridge over the Drina, it means that he has already discretely replaced the Serbian national secessionism from the imperial time of Young Bosnia with the Serbian paternal (inter)nationalism from the age of the Yugoslav community of nations. According to Brubaker, the Serbs in Yugoslavia, like the Russians in the Soviet Union, did not only take Serbia to be their home but rather the whole country (Nationalism reframed 74). Their ethnic nationalism, like the Russian one, therefore, was only ignited with the awakening of the national consciousness of other Yugoslav components, i.e. at the moment this feeling of being at home within the whole territory was called into question in certain zones. It is also possible to draw an analogy with German paternalism in the Habsburg Empire, which only passes from its naturally relaxed condition characteristic of Joseph II’s rule into a dangerously

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enflamed nationalism with the breakdown of this empire. As we have seen, this central constituencies’ narrow-minded nationalism, characteristic of the successor states’ post-imperial circumstances, was opposed by their selected ‘hybrid’ intellectuals’ ‘paternal’ cosmopolitanism. Yet, in the newly established Yugoslav multinational state in which Andrić takes up this cosmopolitanism, it was not a liberating oppositional platform but instead a homogenizing official politics. The question that unavoidably arises in this connection is whether this ‘benevolent’ platform can escape its delineated hidden alliance with nationalism. It appears that, like Mehmed Pasha’s analogous attempt to bridge up the schism of his childhood, this paternal attitude also compromises itself in the hands of Andrić’s narrator despite all his efforts to avoid this. It is well known that an artworks’ end effects can often betray the sublime intentions of its author. Andrić trusted himself to be able to escape this political ‘poisoning’ of sublime aesthetic achievements. As an adherent of Kant’s aesthetics, he assumed that his works demonstrate the same peaceful self-sufficiency that he so admired in his figures’ behavior.20 Nonetheless his novelistic bridge between the Muslim, Orthodox, Catholic and Jewish cultures, like Mehmed Pasha’s bridge between the two banks of the Drina, must ultimately denude its latently biased construction. Rather than an indifferent sage, the novel’s narrator turns out to be adhering to a ‘civic’ national ideology that, while denouncing the imperial lie of protecting all nations equally, nonetheless resumes its quasi-egalitarian attitude.21 Andrić understandably refused to accept that the Austrians act(ed) for the benefit of humankind but wanted to believe that the Serbs are such unselfish actors. In its outcome, The Bridge over the Drina displays a paradoxical post-imperial imperialism. Its narrator takes up the enlightening mission with regard to the subordinate South Slav constituencies that unwittingly mirrors the one that Hofmannsthal suggested the Austrian poet should undertake with regard to the Slavs in general (“Österreich im Spiegel” 25). Both central constituencies’ representatives feel responsible to explain to marginal constituencies that their mission is universal rather than national. If the latter refuse to 20  See footnote 28. 21  According to Cornwall 176, “an ethnic-German dimension was never far below” the Austrian civic (or French Republican) nationalism in the Habsburg Monarchy. As they persistently overlap, it is impossible to keep these two kinds of nationalism clearly apart. “The fact that ‘many nationalists used both civic and ethnic definitions of the nation depending on what specific goal they wanted to achieve’ means that Germany, like France, cannot serve as an ideal-typical pole in a geographic typology of nationalism.” (Baycroft and Hewitson 8).

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accept this then, firstly, this is because of their immaturity and, secondly, a mature person, being ultimately responsible only to God, must nevertheless go on with his or her sacrificial mission. Because this person sees something that the blinded others overlook, Hofmannsthal claims, s/he exposes himself or herself to a common misunderstanding and contempt anyway (“Der Dichter” 66–68). Like emperors, artists cannot care about the disagreement of their subjects but must persevere with their sacrificial mission for these subjects’ ultimate wellbeing. In this regard, they act like “genuine ideologues” typical of the “postimperial democracies’ ” highly turbulent social environments (Hanson xix). Yet even such ‘sacrificial’ artists like Andrić and Hofmannsthal need to establish ‘elective affinities’ with forerunners and contemporaries in order for their missions to be recognized and accomplished. Therefore the Serbian characters are portrayed in the novel as particularly frequent victims of foreign oppressors who undergo sanctification in the collective national memory. According to Hofmannsthal, such victims have to be rewarded for “redeeming the suffering of the thousands by finding the expression for it” (“Der Dichter” 70–71). As these victims’ self-instituted representative, Andrić’s narrator takes care of this reward by artistically refining and sublimating both their own and their consecrators’ elementary, i.e. ‘gesturing’ and mythic expression. The third and fourth chapters delineate the Serbian rebel Radisav, the sixth the echoes of Serbian uprisings, and the twenty-first the Austrian revenge against the Serbian rebels because of the Sarajevo assassination. This does not exhaust the list of Serbian martyrs.22 At one point when the narrator speaks about the rebels’ fires in Serbia, that could even be discerned from the Drina’s other bank, he states that “both Turks and Serbs saw the fires clearly and looked at them attentively”. Subsequently, however, not only does he not hide which of these camps is his, but points out the sacrificial continuity of this camp’s rebellious historical existence:

22  As Nataša Kovačević remarks, next to the children immured in the bridge, other executed Serbian outsiders “include an elderly, ‘feeble-minded,’ ‘vagabond religious pilgrim’ Jelisije, a ‘holy fool’ type of character, as well as a poor Serbian youth Mile, who ‘lived quite alone in a water-mill’ and who is punished for singing a Serbian revolt song to himself in a forest, because ‘he had heard others singing’ it” (The Bridge 85–87). All of them are “random, socially undistinguished martyrs” who happened to be “in the wrong place at the wrong time” (Kovačević 181). Kovačević claims that Andrić’s narrator demystifies the mythical appropriation of these outsiders for the Serbian national cause, which is true. However she disregards that he, through an artistic sublimation of their victimhood, ultimately remystifies them for the Serbian supranational (or ‘paternally cosmopolitan’) cause, which is my claim.

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The Serbian women crossed themselves in the darkness and wept from inexplicable emotion, but in their tears they saw reflected those fires of insurrection even as those ghostly flames which had once fallen upon Radisav’s grave and which their ancestors almost three centuries before had also seen through their tears from that same Mejdan.23 The Bridge 83

Such frequent evocation of sacrificial predecessors indicates that the narrator’s imperial literary perspective is at pain to redeem the executed victims of the imperial political strategy. As the limitless mobility of his mind, which presents itself as the crown of this long tradition, unmasks the tormenting character of the mobility of imperial rulers, his therapy finds its breeding ground in a new feeling of superiority over them. This long-term process of transformation that culminates in the generous benevolence of Andrić’s narrator evokes that which Nietzsche describes in On the Genealogy of Morals as the contagious seed of “a hatred the like of which has never been on earth” miraculously resulting in “the deepest and most sublime of all kinds of love” (On the Genealogy 20).24 As a representative of a similarly frustrated nation, Hofmannsthal argued that the turbulences of the post-imperial age turned Austrians into the single 23  “The Serbian women” (here and in the citation below) are in the original “naše žene” (our women) which clearly identifies the ‘impartial’ narrator as a member of Serbian community. This paragraph refers to the novel’s beginning where the narrator, in the same ‘holy’ connection with Radisav’s martyrdom, addresses the faith of “our women” for the first time: “The Serbian women believe that there is one night of the year when a strong white light can be seen falling on that tumulus direct from heaven” (18). 24  In § 354 and 355 of The Joyful Wisdom, Nietzsche presents his own philosophical technique as a culmination of a long development that began with the “denigrated and humiliated” mob; continued with the actor who has learned to command his instincts with other instincts; then the “artist” like the buffoon, the fool and the clown; thereupon, the proper artist; until the process was finally crowned with the “genius”. The delineated process that leads the subject full of ressentiment from the other-directed negation to self-negation matches the one that Andrić’s subject has undergone. In Andrić’s case, this self-negation spawned an interminable series of self-disengagements for his narrator. He thereby spontaneously followed Kant who expected the “genius” to continuously disengage the automatic application of his or her reason’s habits (Critique of Judgment 134– 137). Inasmuch as Wittgenstein adhered to Kant’s ‘ethical transcendentalism” (Janik and Toulmin 227–319), he also spontaneously followed the commitment of Wittgenstein’s philosophy to the systematic deconstruction of all metaphysical statements (Tractatus 6.53). Andrić’s resolute siding with self-negation against the other-directed negation, which was induced by his personal trauma, clearly differs from Crnjanski’s and Krleža’s continuous pending between these two kinds of negation as delineated in Chapter One.

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mobile, progressive, European part of the German spirit that is now responsible for pushing humankind forward (“Die österreichische Idee” 457) in the manner that previously characterized the Germans (“Der Auslandsdeutsche” 214). In order to compensate for the bitter feeling of dispossession generated by the reiterated execution of the imperial authority over them, the victims take up this authority’s protecting mission—the Austrians that of the Germans and the Serbs that of the Austrians. I propose that these peculiar nesting Occidentalisms be read as a process of a consecutive re-appropriation parallel to the one which Milica Bakić-Hayden dubbed “nesting Orientalisms”, implying the concatenated transfer of stigma to the ‘Orientals’. In contrast to nesting Orientalisms’ derogation of others, the stubborn re-appropriation of Western mission aims at its carriers’ remedial self-aggrandizement. Yet inasmuch as nesting Occidentalisms ultimately unmask the Western mission as a discrimination-based myth through their reiterated failures, their carriers inadvertently derogate rather than aggrandize themselves. As such a spontaneous appropriator of the Western ‘fatherly’ mission, Andrić’s narrative technique ultimately acquires the compromised profile of a manipulative mythopoeia. Like his dethroned imperial predecessor, his postimperial myth of the postponed reunion of divided humankind imposes new divisions in his effort to eliminate the old ones. For this subject, the world only makes sense if it fully succumbs to his vision of universal human reconciliation instead of drawing him into the conflict of divergent affiliations. However, as Balibar stated concerning the possibility of an uninterested contemplation of the modern world’s fundamental disagreement, “there is no neutral position or discourse here, no way of being ‘above the fray’ ” (57). Inasmuch as Andrić’s narrator endeavors to gain the status of the Subject That Knows in this kind of world that cannot tolerate ‘sages’ anymore, his passionate attachment to the horizon of reconciliation presents itself less as a well-reflected strategy and more as a convulsive defensive reaction.

Bosnian Chronicle

Let us now test this thesis by turning to another of Andrić’s major novels, The Bosnian Chronicle, which focuses on the rise and fall of Napoleon in the remote reflection of the Bosnian-Herzegovinian province (1807–1814). In this novel too, the narrator alternately plunges into the views of the French, Austrians, Ottomans, Serbs, Croats and domestic Muslims, the potentates and subjects, foreigners and indigenous, men and women, rich and poor, in order to construct, via their diverse and often confronted opinions, the polyvalent truth

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of an age full of tensions and misunderstandings. Each view that is presented makes a relatively autonomous constituent of the ongoing dialogue between the Orient and Occident, two confronted but also internally heterogeneous and divided worlds. Inasmuch as no single view deserves the narrator’s full attachment, the truth emerges through the changing relationship between them, a mobile network that they are at pains to come to terms with. It is put together not only contrastively but also through the steady reconfiguration of its whole, in a relentless search for the ultimate horizon of reconciliation of human disagreements. However, since this horizon is beyond human reach, the narrator’s search is open-ended and uncertain with regard to its outcome. It progresses toward its goal through a continuous self-refutation. Faced with such a frustrating state of affairs that scrambles the ground under their feet, the characters themselves ardently long for the final truth that would elucidate their role in the world, providing them with remedial balance and peace. At one place in the novel, Cologna entrusts Des Fossés with his eminently religious belief that, significantly, also lays the ground for Bakhtin’s theory of the novel: “At the end, at the real, final end, all will nevertheless be well and everything will be resolved harmoniously” (Bosnian Chronicle 264).25 This unshakable belief in divine justice has such an importance for Des Fossés that he literally repeats it several chapters thereafter (297). At another place, again, the narrator remarks somewhat ironically that Daville, in a utopian fashion, was looking for what cannot be found either in life or books: a compassionate, kind-hearted friend, willing to listen to everything and able to understand everything, with whom he would converse openly and who would answer all his questions clearly and honestly. In such a conversation, as in a mirror, he would be able to see for the first time his true image, to realize the real value of his work and determine his position in the world unambiguously. (355–356) 25  In a significant imaginary dialogue from Signs by the Roadside one interlocutor states: “They say that somewhere the place of the true judgment and full truth exists. There, everything that was hidden and secret between people is learned about and published, everything that was upside down and wrong is stated, everything that was embezzled or abducted returned, compensated to the one who was robbed and taken away from the one who has got too much” (Znakovi 79). To the ironic commentary of the other interlocutor that this is a pure utopia, this interlocutor replies that, if man is brave, honest and steady, this “place is here among us”. This belief—that strongly reminds us of Benjamin’s sentence that “each second is a small gate through which the Messiah might enter” (“Über den Begriff der Geschichte” 261)—keeps the last word, indicating the author’s proximity to Cologna’s and Des Fossés’ weak messianic worldview.

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So the characters intensely yearn for the Bakhtinian “Third in the dialogue” in order to dispel their delusion by his objective truth.26 Their powerful desire ultimately results in an optative projection of this Third who, however, must remain absent because only if he is constitutively unreachable can he fulfil his messianic function. As soon as this Absent God acquires the traits of a concrete interlocutor, the characters, in a typical denial of the trauma of their deracination, abhor and reject him. Thus in chapter seventeen, Daville is unpleasantly astonished by Des Fossés’ impartiality that analysed all the phenomena around him, endeavouring to find reasons for all of them both in themselves and in the conditions which had given rise to them, regardless of the damage or benefit, comfort or discomfort which they might momentarily afford the Consulate. Daville had always found the young man’s cool, disinterested objectivity disturbing and disagreeable. (286) Daville is frightened by the depth and unfathomability of the truth that the young man takes as the regulative idea of his behavior. This faith once again fascinates Des Fossés in Cologna’s religious representation of the approximation to the truth, this time based in the Koran: You understand, it is all connected, one thing with another, and it is only apparently lost and forgotten, scattered, haphazard. It is all moving, even without realizing it, towards the same goal, like converging rays towards a distant, unknown focus. You should not forget that it is explicitly written in the Koran: ‘Perhaps one day God will reconcile you and your opponents and establish friendship between you. He is powerful, mild and merciful.’ (265–266) What persistently scares the French consul about his young assistant is the boldness with which he engages the investigation of the truth, irrespective 26  See Bakhtin, Estetika 305–306. Like Daville, Bakhtin states that we expect from this Third an “absolute correct understanding” beyond the “immediate understanding” but cautions, like the narrator, that one can find such an understanding only in the “remote historical time.” Although it is impossible in the provisional earthly life, Andrić trusted that the individuals of the messianic call and profile (among whom he obviously counted himself) can embody such understanding as it were representatively. Like Bakhtin, accordingly, he highlighted the emancipating and neglected the cruel effects of messianic missions.

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of the pain that the truth’s discovery inflicts on individual beliefs and the eradication of affiliations which it spawns. Itself established in-between the affiliations, Des Fossés’ “double consciousness” aims to redeem the enforced ‘in-betweennees’ of the Levantines, which Cologna, as the most prominent among them, describes as follows: No one knows what it means to be born and to live on the brink, between two worlds, knowing and understanding both of them, and to be unable to do anything to help explain them to each other and bring them closer. To love and hate both, to hesitate and waver all one’s life. To have two homelands, and yet have none. To be everywhere at home and to remain forever a stranger. In short, to live torn on a rack, but as both victim and torturer at once. (262) Aiming to redeem this enforced in-betweenness, Andrić’s narrator is the follower and continuator of Des Fossés’ bold investigation of the truth’s complexity. He does everything to raise the reader above Bosnia’s clashing worlds but, in this very way, ultimately draws him or her involuntarily into these worlds’ conflict. He firstly gives the ideas of Daville, Des Fossés, von Paulich, von Mitterer, the Ottoman officers and numerous small people enough room to present their arguments, in order to relativize them by confronting them with the other, opposed arguments immediately thereafter. Yet the ultimate elimination of disagreements between the cultures is impossible because that with which the other irritates us is that which, to avoid the painful truth, we tend to deny at all costs. Daville abhors the dreadful scenes of the severed and impaled Serbian rebels’ heads, which he discards as a barbarian custom because he suppresses having witnessed the same scene some fifteen years earlier in Paris. Von Mitterer only perceives the domestic population’s singing as an unbearable screaming because it reminds him of his wife’s singing that, indicative of her obscene feelings, terribly irritates him. Since nobody wants to face the unpleasant truth of oneself and transfers the guilt for it onto the other, irrational outbursts rule the world. Not only do they befall individuals but also, in the bloody public rituals of sovereign power, groups: The throng started jostling and shoving. They all pressed towards the scene of the ordeal. The people responded enthusiastically and joyfully to the first movements of the tortured man, accompanying his movements with their cries, laughter and gestures. But when the spasms of the strangled man became deathly and his movements appalling and fantastic, those who were closest began to turn to move away. […] But

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the throng of people who had not been able to see surged forward and pushed those who were in front ever closer. Then these people, horrified by the proximity of the unexpected agony, turned their backs on the site of the execution and made desperate efforts to force their way through, flailing around them with their fists in frenzy, as though escaping from a fire. Not knowing what was driving them and unable to understand their panic-stricken behaviour, other people responded to their blows with blows, forcing them back the way they had come. […] Completely different voices and exclamations mingled and collided with each other, angry, astonished, disgusted, furious, mocking, jovial, all mixed with the general inarticulate cries and clamour of a crowd of people, their stomachs pressed against one another and their lungs constricted. (270–271) But even such violent outpourings of collective anger have their logic, no matter how much it escapes their participants and witnesses. Although the narrator understands this logic much better than they do, neither can he completely fathom it, which he takes as a provisional mishap that, paradoxically, only strengthens his faith that it exists: It is impossible to penetrate the logic of these bazaar riots, blind, furious, and always fruitless, but they do have a logic of their own, just as they have an imperceptible technique, based on tradition and instinct. (142) This unshakable faith in the divine sense of earthly occurrences legitimizes the narrator’s exemption from the biased views of their participants; this messianism authorizes his consistent distancing from the blind spots in their opinions. Even when it comes to those who are like his representatives or doubles (such as Alibeg Pašić and Fehim Bahtijarević in The Bridge or, in Bosnian Chronicle, Cologna and Des Fossés, whose perspective is more embracing and complex than that of the other figures),27 Andrić’s narrator refuses to completely identi27  Andrić introduced various (physical, psychic, ideological) kinds of Doppelgängers (men, women, even objects such as the bridge) abundantly into his works. In The Woman from Sarajevo, for example, the Bosnian poet Petar Budimirović appears, the narrator saying that he, together with his companion Janko Stiković, belonged to the Bosnian revolutionary national youth movement and spent four years in an Austrian prison: “He was smaller and more modest than Stiković. With glasses on his tired eyes and thin, shaven lips, his sharp profile had something of inquisitorial rigor that his painful smile has not mitigated but made even harder. The girls observed his skinny and properly shaped hands but he, without looking at anyone, read one of his favorite poems in prose” (Budimirović then reads a poem that was already published under Andrić’s name) (Gospođica 169). Whereas

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fy with them in the name of a deeper, broader and more nuanced understanding that is yet to come. When their opinions diverge from those of the figures sentenced to their beliefs, he certainly privileges their superior reflective ability but never misses out on indicating that even they cannot penetrate into the all-embracing messianic sense of earthly affairs, at the service of which he places his own investigation. For example, the impartial mobility of Des Fossés’ mind is, on the one hand, superior to the typically Western prejudices of Daville’s worldview but, on the other hand, is inferior to the imperial province’s self-sufficient silence: At times there would indeed be a sound, sharp and unexpected: a shot somewhere on the edge of town, a dog barking at a rare passer-by or at its own dream. It lasted only a moment, making the silence still greater, for a hush would close in over it at once, like deep, endless waters. It was as impossible to sleep in this silence, as it would be in an orgy of noise. One could do nothing but sit and sense it threatening to corrode, crush, wipe one out of the ranks of conscious, living beings. (125) This impenetrable Bosnian silence that simultaneously frightens and attracts the young French enlightener because he discerns in it the all-elucidating secret of death, is the true and ultimate object of the narrator’s fascination. In the same way as Des Fossés’ double consciousness endeavors to redeem the Levantines’ divided existence, the narrator’s polyphonic consciousness that systemically exempts itself from the ‘noise of earthly human affairs’ wants to redeem this dark silence. Surrounded by the misunderstanding of their milieus, they take the burden of a messianic mission upon themselves.

Budimirović is thus the physical ‘portrait of the artist as a young man’, Alibeg Pašić from The Bridge represents the character of the adult artist: “He was always of the same mood, universally amiable and restrained towards all, without distinction. Quiet and reserved, he did not avoid society or conversation, yet no one ever remembered any opinion expressed by him […]. He was sufficient unto himself and completely satisfied with what he was and what he seemed in the eyes of others. […] He was one of those men who bear their social position as some heavy and noble calling which completely fills their lives; an inborn, great and dignified position justified by itself alone and which cannot be explained, nor denied nor imitated” (183–184). Of course, the very fact that the author presents himself through different figures implies that his “true I” belongs to neither of them completely. It is a sort of a go-between caught in an infinite identity search.

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This state of affairs bestows grandness upon the cold gentlemanly restraint of the author’s second Doppelgänger, Fehim Bahtijarević in The Bridge,28 for whom the narrator states that his “silence seemed a thing apart, heavy and obstinate […] like an impassable wall in the darkness which by the very weight of its existence resolutely rejected all that the other had said” (The Bridge 246):29 For it is not human desires that dispose and administer the things of the world. Desire is like a wind; it shifts the dust from one place to another, sometimes darkens the whole horizon, but in the end calms down and falls and leaves the old eternal picture of the world. Lasting deeds are realized on this earth only by God’s will, and man is only His blind and humble tool. (246) An equally silent self-sufficiency surrounds the bridge, for which people naively trust that it is at their service in the same way that they trust that “the sun rises in the morning so that men may see around them and finish their daily tasks, and sets in the evening that they may be able to sleep and rest from the 28  Critics have usually taken the figure of Toma Galus to be the author’s Doppelgänger in this novel. He also appears in the autobiographically intoned collection of stories about prison-life from the 1930s, The Woman from Sarajevo, and the unfinished, posthumously published autobiographical novel On the Sunnyside. But in The Bridge, Galus builds a “couple” with his antagonist Bahtijarević, whereby he represents the prewar “enflamed” Andrić and Bahtijarević the postwar sober Andrić. As one of Andrić’s favorite maneuvers, the distribution of the author’s internal contradictions into such contrapuntal figures draws on the tradition of the polyphonic novel in Bakhtin’s interpretation. In this kind of novel, authors systematically elude to the readers’ identification, maintaining their superiority. This means that Andrić’s authorial agency does not simply disintegrate into a multiplicity of warring selves but aims at its overcoming and uniting. In Bakhtin’s rendering, the assimilating operation of re-entering the figures’ minds (he translates the German term Einfühlung as vzhivanie) ends with the profitable return to the author’s own place (Art and Answerability 25). Andrić’s authorial detour follows the same guideline as Bakhtin’s self-authoring operation: “My unity for myself is perpetually yet-to-be” (126). Both go back to § 49 of Kant’s Critique of Judgment that describes the reception of a work of art as a constitutively open but nonetheless orientated process that is hideously guided by an ultimate authority. 29  As a notoriously taciturn man, Andrić was well aware of how much this irritates his interlocutors. We read in Anika’s Times: “Thus he sat for hours, looking at the ceiling, and recalling not so much her words as her silences. He was full of that silence of hers and felt it in his intestines. […] Her silence shortens his breath and clouds his sight. If he could once more sit next to her, he would take that head in both his hands, twist it violently, bend it down to the bed, to the floor, to the grass” (413).

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labours of the day” (13–14). The truth, however, is that the bridge is as completely indifferent toward the people as Anika is toward her clients, whatever they might chatter about her, in Andrić’s story “Anika’s Times”.30 Reigning tranquilly like nature over the senseless human ‘sound and fury,’ the silence and beauty legitimate the self-exemption from the petty human belongings of Andrić’s narrator. When he states that Anika’s beauty was born without connection to that which surrounded her, but simply ‘occurred’, he manifests his full attachment to Kant’s aesthetic in which beautiful art cannot be derived from rules. Perfection is a messianic revelation independent of human endeavors. Only in this way can the emergence of the bridge over the Drina be explained. In the novel, Bahtijarević has the following to say about it: “In truth great men and great buildings rise and will rise only where they are appointed to arise in God’s thought, in their right place independent of empty transient desires and human vanity” (246). Yet the mysterious mildness of nature already wins over the wild orgies of irrational human anger in Bosnian Chronicle: And the days were sunny, the sky cloudless, the town full of greenery, water, early fruit and flowers. At night the moon shone, clear, glassy and chill. And the bloody carnival continued, day and night, with everyone bent on the same purpose and no one able to understand anyone else or recognize himself. Bosnian Chronicle 275

With its quiet and harmonious cyclical rhythms, such an idyllically perceived nature, along with its siblings silence and beauty, legitimizes Andrić’s narrator to exempt himself from the frenzied outbursts of human history by throwing a wise redeeming glance full of compassionate understanding on its blinded faith 30  Regarding the bridge: “The many and important changes which had taken place in the spirits and habits of the citizens in the outward appearance of the town seemed as though they passed by the bridge without affecting it. It seemed that the white and ancient bridge, across which men had passed for three centuries, remained unchanged without trace or mark even under the ‘new Emperor’ and that it would triumph over this flood of change and innovation even as it had always triumphed over the greatest floods, arising once more, white and untouched, from the furious mass of troubled waters which had wanted to flow over it” (The Bridge 142–143). Regarding Anika: “This whole, large, harmonious body, solemn in its tranquility, slow in its movement, seemingly preoccupied only with itself, feeling no desire or need to resemble others—it was like a rich, self-sufficient empire, with nothing to conceal and no need to display its wealth, living in silence and despising others for their need to talk and explain themselves” (“Anika’s Times” 414).

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in historical progress. This glance that underlies the imperial sententiousness of this Subject That Knows relies on the therapeutic belief in nature’s predetermined harmony: it will, at the end of time, equalize all historical injustices. Lauren Berlant termed such belief “cruel optimism,” defining it as a passionate attachment to the scene of fantasy that actively impedes the aim of that same attachment (1). But it is precisely the increasing damage that these fantasies repeatedly cause that stimulates their adherents to persevere, expecting that “this time, nearness to this thing will help [them] or a world to become different in just the right way” (1). Berlant’s argument is that, instead of ameliorating and diminishing as proofs of the perilousness of the fantasy that stimulates it proliferate, optimism, on the contrary, grows, becoming ever crueler toward those who refuse it or are unable to join it. Such intensification reveals this optimism’s repudiated traumatic origin and hidden self-therapeutic character. What perpetuates it is not a desire for the truth but the constantly instigated pain of a denied wound. This brutal, traumatic optimism sets the terms for the reading of Andrić’s oeuvre today, after the key fantasy that shapes his narrative technique unleashed its destructive potential. Blaming him for this fantasy, let alone for the undesired developments associated with it, is clearly out of the question. His messianic project for the abolition of a differentiated political world in the name of an indifferent natural commonality, the harmony of which he stubbornly trusted, grows from an early experience of dispossession. From the formative period of his life, consecutive political, ideological and economic dispossessions had frustrated his contemporaries’ personal and group identifications with short-term objectives by directing their identity search toward long-term inaccessible objectives. By defending himself against the repeated injuries to which the group and individual attachments to immediate political liberations exposed him and his contemporaries, Andrić relegated his hopes to the disunited human community’s infinitely postponed redemption. As such an objective could not be reached in the limited personal or generational temporal terms, these hopes were at least spared of a bitter disappointment. After the breakdown of empires, the East-Central European space became a hotbed of enflamed political ideologies carried by “true believers” who “marched like lemmings to their own political or personal destruction” (Hanson xv). The faith in the future divine redemption of the presently compartmentalized world by Andrić’s narrator can therefore be read as an individual literary response to failed collective political projects. According to this writer’s deepest conviction, literature’s true mission is to save the world from activist blindness. However, if his literary response expects his readers to give up their earthly affiliations for an uncertain imagined community, does this not mean

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that, on another level, it resumes the same political project that it blames for such blindness? Like political projects aimed at short-term liberation, literary projects aimed at long-term salvation cannot but emerge from their designer’s need for support. Without the readership’s massive embrace they could not become projects at all. The questions are: while recognizing their own therapy in the therapy of Andrić’s personal and generational trauma, has his readership marched like lemmings to their own destruction? By doing so, has it confirmed the well-known rule that a literary work’s after-effects do not necessarily coincide with its writer’s intentions? (Magris 290) Whatever the answers might be, instead of enthusiastically adhering to Andrić’s grandiose mission, today we are advised to carefully analytically release the defensive spasm that underlies it.

Karl Kraus: The Last Days of Humankind

Andrić’s narrative response to the post-imperial trauma reflects his peculiar position within the overall traumatic constellation. His way of exempting himself from short-term political engagements resulted in a redemptive projection of self-sufficient entities such as beauty, silence, nature, and cosmos, which he invented to legitimate the apparently uninterested superiority of his perspective. The Dual Monarchy’s breakdown also exposed Austrian writers to dispossession, but whereas Andrić’s dispossessor was the Empire’s deceitful transnationalism, Austrian writers experienced themselves as the victims of rising nationalisms. In fact, that which has today been reclaimed as the typically transnational ‘Habsburg mentality’ originally came into being as opposition to the rise of the German national idea after the German Empire’s enforced separation in 1806. The myth of the ‘monarchy of many peoples’ (Vielvölkermonarchie) that, after the Prussians had renounced the German Empire’s cosmopolitan mission, proudly resumed this mission, emerged as a clear compensation for the bitter political, territorial, and symbolic losses. Since the Prussian model of assimilating differences into a national unity was impossible in the Habsburg multiethnic region, their peaceful coexistence was declared a new cosmopolitan ideal. This late Habsburg ideal, bereft of proactivity in the forthcoming century of nation-states, represented a huge setback in comparison to the enlightened efforts of Maria Theresa and Joseph II to unite their Empire. While these two emperors undertook to build up a community “defined by common borders, by subjection to common laws, by a common government, and of course by a common dynasty” (Judson, The Habsburg Empire 48)—and that in this regard “resembled its European counterparts

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more than it differed from them” (49)—Francis I, after the breakdown of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, turned to the unity defined by a common commitment to peace. Since this orientation could not function as an engine for reform anymore, in the nineteenth century the nation-states took up the mission of their populations’ patriotic unification. The Austrian cosmopolitan ideal was reaffirmed after the repetition of trauma, the bitter defeat at Königgrätz in 1866, when Austria definitively lost its traditional political hegemony over Germany. To compensate for this loss and the inferiority complex engendered through it the Austrian Empire launched, on the wings of its already established ideology of unity in diversity, a huge civilizing mission directed at eastern and southeastern Europe. The Vienna World’s Fair (1873), the founding of the university in Czernowitz (1875), and the famous Kronprinzenwerk, twenty-four volume encyclopedia Die österreichisch-ungarische Monarchie in Wort und Bild (1885–1907), for example, were designed to popularize the monarchy’s diversity. However, this remedial project was gradually forced to retreat from the public political arena into the private aesthetic realm, perverting into a self-oblivious gayness and melancholic carelessness toward the end of the century. These life attitudes aptly manifested the so-called ‘gay apocalypse’ (Broch, Hofmannsthal und seine Zeit 40–48) of the Empire’s prolonged termination. Finally, at the turn of the century, it is small wonder that its representative political and intellectual agencies behaved in a manner which Magris described as “restrained indecisiveness” and “squeamish muddling through” (zimperliches Fortwursteln) (Magris 29–31). In such a situation, the Austrian fin-de-siècle writers faced a twofold challenge. On the one hand, in the atmosphere of the disintegrating Empire, artworks were threatened with becoming instruments in the political battle between compartmentalized national perspectives. On the other hand, the decadent cultural elites, encapsulated as they were in their politically disinterested hedonism, vulgarized and devalued the art’s mission. The situation of Austrian-Jewish writers was particularly tricky in this context. The Jews, deprived at that time of their own territory, state, and language, were much more dependent upon the Empire’s survival than its other constituencies. Like many of Vienna’s leading fin-de-siècle representatives (Beller 11–70), Karl Kraus was of Jewish origin, sentencing him to the role of a ‘man without (the nonborrowed identity) qualities’. Because the forces of historical circumstances bereft him of his ‘genuine’ belonging, he relied on a distanced belonging to various cultures. As he himself once remarked, by opposing the Zionist idea which was on the rise, the Jews were “fated to dissolve entirely into their surrounding cultures, and nevertheless still to remain a ferment in them” (Eine Krone für Zion 23). This allocated internal exteriority forced “them to come to

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terms with things in a way others, generally, were not [forced]. There was thus in a sense a special role for Jews, one might say a secular version of the chosen people” (Beller 217). Hannah Arendt commented on the situation of Europe’s Jews on the verge of the First World War and after it in her 1944 essay “The Jew as Pariah”. Leaving aside Zionism and conversion to German Protestantism, I will instead focus on the two remaining options that she elaborates on: 1) finding common cause with other outsiders in society and 2) taking refuge in the world of nature and art in which, at least provisionally, one becomes invulnerable. Hugo von Hofmannsthal became aware of his Jewishness under the given circumstances after a period of full assimilation and embraced the first option. Being of Jewish origin, he firstly identified with the underestimated Germans against the so-called great European nations, secondly with the devalued Austrians against the Germans, and thirdly with the despised Slavs against the Austrians. Despite these imagined alliances, he did not manage to get rid of his stigmatized Jewishness. Another case in point is Joyce’s hero Leopold Bloom who was born of a Hungarian-Jewish father (Virag—bloom or flower) in the year of Hungary’s rebirth (i.e. in 1866, when the Austrians were defeated at Königgrätz). He is rumored among the characters in the novel to be the secret Jewish advisor to Arthur Griffith, the founder of the Irish Sinn Fein, who 1904 advocated the Hungarian plan of separation from Austria as a blueprint for Ireland’s future relationship with Great Britain. Yet although he, by supporting Irish nationalists against the British Empire, acts as an Irish patriot, his Irish compatriots (his mother was Irish) never fail to address his hybrid identity by stigmatizing him as a “Virag from Hungary” (i.e. an outsider both in Ireland and Hungary) and “Ahasuerus.” He remains a rootless wanderer, irrevocably pinned down to his Jewish identity. The Catholic and the Protestant Irishmen, “political and religious enemies, can unite in their anti-Semitic hatred of Bloom” (Loewenberg 245). Karl Kraus, for his part, chose the other, more individual way by trying to save his self from the accelerated commodification of public identities. Preferring the personal over a group identity, he took recourse to the German Enlightenment that adhered to the idea of individual freedom as opposed to the German Romanticist national identification adopted by some of his Jewish contemporaries (Viktor Adler, for example) (Beller 15–152). Although both of these identity politics denied their original Jewishness, Adler obliterated it in the name of a man with German national qualities and Kraus in the name of a man without qualities, i.e. caught in a process of persistent self-negation. As the world exposed the human self to an irrevocable disaggregation into a bundle of warring constituents, according to his influential younger contemporary

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Ernst Mach (Erkenntnis und Irrtum), Kraus, like Wittgenstein, preferred to exempt his self from such uncontrolled multiplication. Another of Kraus’ important contemporaries, Otto Weininger, attributed this inadmissible carnival of the self—probably inspired by Nietzsche’s argument in Joyful Wisdom (§ 361) and On the Genealogy of Morals (§ 8)—to women and the Jews who learned through their history to disguise themselves by crawling into other identities (Geschlecht und Charakter 409–420). Kraus wanted to prevent this disaggregation of his self into commodified particles but not, like Weininger, in order to save the original Jewish religious identity but rather to rescue the creativity of the self’s constitution.31 In accordance with Wittgenstein’s dictum “[t]he sense of the world must lie outside the world” (Tractatus 6.41), he enabled the self to exempt itself from the readymade patterns of the world instead of letting these patterns stop its mobility. Put in Kantian terms, as opposed to the world as the carrier of thousands 31  This creativity was, to be sure, a substantial part of the Austrian Jewish liberal heritage. According to Beller, in the frame of the Habsburg Monarchy the Enlightenment project of individual freedom was launched by a group of progressive Jewish intellectuals in the aftermath of Joseph II’s Toleranzpatent (122–143). By embracing Western standards, they wanted to emancipate themselves from the Jewish religious fanaticism of their ‘retrograde’ Eastern compatriots (which means that Weininger resumes precisely this opposite Jewish tradition). At the outcome, the Austrian fin-de-siècle bourgeois liberal culture was not an exclusively Jewish achievement but at least predominantly. By systematically educating themselves on the Western model, the Viennese Jewish intellectuals of the second half of the nineteenth century envisaged a complete Jewish assimilation into humanity (Beller 134–136). “The aim of the progressives in Austrian society was thus to destroy completely a separate Jewish identity” (139). At the turn-of-the-century, finally, it proved that they alone were carrying the standard of enlightenment whereas the rest of society had already rejected it, which ended with the Empire’s breakdown and the failure of the project. The doggedness with which Kraus defends this tradition in The Last Days of Humankind reflects this desperate situation. He creates an imaginary refuge to protect the ethical pursuit of truth and honesty from the “soul merchants”, the “accidents of birth”, and the “vagaries of existence” (235), or to safeguard the principle of personal honesty from institutional dishonesty (219). Considering this defense of the sunken humanism against aggressive capitalism, Magris rightly interprets Kraus as a “great conservative” (238). The freedom of self-creation could not be everybody’s concern as the population’s access to education was seriously limited and the aristocracy did not need education to achieve recognition for its identity. The process of the Austrian postwar political and social disintegration made Kraus aware of these shortcomings of his identity politics, which is why, after the publication of his drama, he gradually retreated to his previously abandoned ‘retrograde’ Jewishness. Like Crnjanski and Krleža (see Chapter One), he pended between the identity patterns based on self-negation resp. the other-directed negation.

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of opinions, Kraus interprets the self as being capable of reasoning, which is for him an eminently aesthetic activity. Like Kant in his Critique of Judgment (124–125)—although Kraus does not refer to him—he clearly privileges aesthetic over rational judgment. This is why Kraus, although he admired both Schopenhauer and Weininger, disagreed with their attacks against women’s technology of consistently impersonating or adapting themselves to others (Weininger, Geschlecht und Charakter 409–420). He claimed that the female sensual perception (or aisthēsis) and phantasy make the very source of human spirit (“Beim Wort genommen” 13–56). It is only the recent journalistic degeneration of human mind that has turned this genuinely aesthetic spirit into an empty opinion-holder (“Untergang der Welt durch schwarze Magie” 44–45). Since the wartime also deeply devalued and compromised speech, in his famous lecture In This Great Time (1914) Kraus expressed his preference for keeping silent (“In dieser großen Zeit”). In an age in which the press perverted language into an instrument of war, decent individuals would hold their tongues. By summoning people to express their opinions against each other, the press disables their reasoning, which for Kraus is the only activity of real public interest. By way of opinions, humans reach common sense but not public sense. Only by reasoning can they creatively search for their identity. In this vein, humans exempt themselves from the apparent ‘givens’ of humankind, denouncing them as fabrications. As Kraus put it, “the style does not express that which somebody opines (meint) but gives shape to somebody’s reasoning (denkt)” (“Die Sprache” 41). Such reasoning tirelessly dismantles opinions. Following this thread, decomposition becomes the paradoxical compositional principle of Kraus’ monumental drama The Last Days of Humankind (1922). As his polemics against Max Reinhardt’s and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s pompously synesthetic theater testifies, he opposed the uniting of poetry, music and theater into a Gesamtkunstwerk on the decadent model of Wagner and D’Annunzio (Janik and Toulmin 103–105). By forcefully homogenizing heterogeneities, this synthesis amounts to discrimination. Kraus is dedicated to the liberation of human judgmental ability from such confinements. Behind their promise of human sovereignty over the ‘minor beings’, he detects the wounded objects, creatures, and natural catastrophes as “the response of the world court to the sacrilegious existence of man” (Benjamin, “Karl Kraus” 359). Whatever the humans mobilize against the spirit of creation—the technique, media or world war—they cannot destroy it. Significantly, Kraus celebrated the Viennese popular playwright Johann Nestroy because he “organized the spirit’s escape from humankind” (“Untergang der Welt durch schwarze Magie” 239). Nestroy acted as the secret longhand of the suppressed spirit of creation. The artist should let this creative spirit govern his or her operations instead

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of trying to take command of them. “I command only the language of others,” states Kraus accordingly, “[m]y language makes out of me whatever it wants” (“Beim Wort genommen” 326). It is difficult to imagine an artistic credo that would be more in line with Kant’s description of a genius who sets his or her own creative law by systematically exempting him- or herself from any established rule (Critique of Judgment 136–139). The spirit of creation only articulates itself through the stubborn negation of all its acquired identities. This both superhuman and supra-human spirit that consistently refuses disfigurement through human identifications lays down the authoring principle of Kraus’ drama The Last Days of Humankind. As the spirit itself escapes representation, all that can be represented are dramatis personae as its deformations. However subtly, even those among these personae who act as the author’s apparent Doppelgängers adopt this fabricated profile. In the last scene (V, 54) in which the author’s ‘chief representative’ Moaner appears in the drama, and which therefore acquires a programmatic value, he sits at his desk just as Kraus himself did when composing his monologue. Moaner describes the disaggregation of his tragedy into the myriad of scenes as a copy of disaggregated humankind (“Die letzten Tage der Menschheit” 681). Indeed, Kraus’ tragedy falls apart into the hundreds of juxtaposed scenes and protagonists and is deprived of both a unifying plot and the so-called dramatic conflict. But this does not mean that we can identify Moaner with the author by taking that which he says as the word of the author himself. Firstly, he ironically shapes this monologue as a manifest by taking distance from the then fashionable avant-garde genre. Secondly, he introduces this manifest with the italicized words “I have carefully considered everything” (Ich habe alles reiflich erwogen), a sarcastic quotation of Emperor Franz Joseph’s war declaration. Thereupon, Moaner ‘cosmic solitude’ is comparable not only with the legendary Emperor’s solitude, or with that of Kraus himself at the moment he composed his drama, but also with that of Shakespeare’s King Lear or Goethe’s Doctor Faust to whose monologues the pathetic intonation of his own monologue clearly alludes. Finally, Moaner beseeches God to redeem the victims of this sinful humankind and Kraus ridicules this in the closing line of the tragedy whereby he lets God confess that he did not want that to happen and that things got out of control (770). Moaner’s much quoted monologue is therefore mocked by multiple quotation marks. Even if his desperate solitude clearly redoubles Kraus’ situation amidst the war, the author’s grimacing face behind him warns us against taking Moaner’s words at their face value. In the introduction to his tragedy (9), Kraus describes this subversive aping as a consistent back-and-forth translation across the border between life and death, i.e. transforming documents, reports, and feuilletons into human

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shapes on the one hand, and translating humans into shadows, puppets, and larvae on the other. In an age that levels down all identities into consumable commodities, he sees such a stubborn re-creation of theirs as an ethical task. This seems to be offering a possible interpretation of Wittgenstein’s contemporaneous and somewhat enigmatic dictum “Ethics and aesthetics are one” (Tractatus 6.421). Kraus’ creative imitation is ethical inasmuch as it refuses to take its originals at their face value. If the semblance remains unrevealed, it distorts the identity that it stays for. Kraus therefore untiringly exposes all the so-called originals’ reverse sides. Yet inasmuch as this exposure itself cannot but produce new semblances, it ultimately proves to be involved in the allencompassing world carnival of identities. To indicate that neither he himself is exempt from this compromising carnival, Kraus replaces detached representation of his dramatis personae with their idiosyncratic miming. To represent means to become a persona in the carnival’s scenario oneself, to copy means to avoid such a destiny. Precisely through miming his personae, Kraus exempts himself from them. As he used to read aloud the fragments of his drama for occasionally assembled audiences, he practiced aping his personae even in this last stage of their embodiment. Attending these public lectures, Benjamin aptly noted that Kraus’ mocking transformed them into the monsters that warned humankind what it has made out of humans (“Karl Kraus” 374). But already, much earlier, in the very process of composing his drama, he treated these dramatis personae with the same revengeful animosity that Shakespeare’s Caliban showed toward his master’s language or that Shakespeare himself demonstrated toward his figures. According to Benjamin, Kraus’ demonic complicity with the personae of The Last Days of Humankind finds its parallel in the cannibals’ incorporation of their victims. He compassionately crawls into them in order to devour them and lick their blood (“Karl Kraus” 365, 375), although not without again castigating himself for such destructive inclinations. Kraus’ fight against the involvement with his figures could not be brought to its successful closure. Since it was constitutively interminable, it contaminated all other aspects of this drama. That is to say, in the same deeply ambiguous manner that characterizes his relationship to the personae of his drama, Kraus perverts the whole genre’s aesthetic identity. Composing a monumental drama with a huge number of figures and venues, he strategically avoids its theatrical performance (“Die letzten Tage der Menschheit” 9). As it could not be gazed at from the safe distance of a darkened auditorium, his drama eluded to the entertaining character of Viennese operettas or popular theatre pieces. Instead, the audience was drawn into the same ‘repulsive compassion’ towards the figures that characterizes the author’s relationship with them. Although the drama’s monumentality and

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range alluded to the baroque theatrum mundi, its fragmentary chamber performances bereft it of the theatrum mundi’s spectacular character. As the horrors represented in the original baroque drama were dictated by divine providence, the original baroque spectators were exempted from responsibility for them. Here, on the contrary, as Moaner puts it in the aforementioned monologue, God renounces any connection with a human ear once and for all. At the very end of his drama, Kraus lets Him directly refute any responsibility for the horrors that transpired. He says “I did not want this”, echoing both the last scene of Goethe’s Faust I and also Wilhelm II’s famous statement at the end of the First World War (Foteva 214–215). Thus, not only are all the figures copies, including the Doppelgänger Moaner, but even God himself or herself. Even his or her statements are put in multiple quotation marks and his or her identity is fabricated. Since there is no ultimate authority to be blamed for the catastrophe, the drama transfers the responsibility for it onto all of the participants involved in it. According to Moaner’s remark, “because this drama has no other hero but humankind, it has no listener either!” (“Die letzten Tage der Menschheit” 671). Recall how the selected fragments of Kraus’ drama could only be listened to. That is to say, the totality of dramatic happenings escapes these listeners in the same way as it escapes the figures that are deeply enmeshed in them. By drawing its author and listeners into such complicity with the dramatis personae’ biased worldview, Kraus’ tragedy of humankind undergoes metamorphosis into a carnival. Unlike the theatre performance, which detaches the author, actors, and spectators from their ‘doubles’, the carnival dispossesses them of themselves by making these ‘doubles’ out of them themselves. Without being aware of this, they mirror and echo one another. Because they are no longer in possession of themselves, the carnival bereaves them of responsibility for their deeds and words, permitting them to unleash their wild passions. This is exactly what happened in the bloody carnival of the First World War, as Kraus’ drama is at great pains to demonstrate. However, inasmuch as the carnival leaves nobody aside, nobody is excused for the consequences of this unbridling. Transformed into such a carnival, The Last Days of Humankind opposes the manner in which the bourgeois theatre exculpates its author, actors, and spectators. Offering the carnival participants no such retreat, Kraus confronts them with the responsibility for the end effects of their unleashed passions. In the age of the “gay apocalypse” (Broch, Hofmannsthal und seine Zeit 44– 48) that stubbornly refused to take the world catastrophe for what it was, Kraus replaces the Viennese theater’s beautiful illusion with a disquieting ethical interpellation. After God delivered humankind to the monsters that its bloody carnival managed to unchain, its integrity ended in ruins. Kraus now urges the humans to reassemble these ruins by passing uneasy judgments. He summons

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them to stroll along the execution site of The Last Days of Humankind, collecting evidence among its scattered splinters like Benjamin’s lonely flaneurs that crisscross and peruse the heap of the exploded world’s ruins. To announce his drama’s redemptive mission, Kraus designates it the High Court of Justice on the ruins (Hochgericht auf Trümmern, 11). This label indicates how the author levels accusations against humankind for the discriminating manner in which it displayed its humanity in the same way as Shakespeare’s Caliban leveled accusations against his master for the discriminating manner in which he practiced his language. Since it is equally impossible for Kraus to escape humankind as it is for Caliban to step out of his master’s language (if he wants to make himself understood), all they can do is grotesquely pervert them, Caliban into a hurting curse and Kraus into a bloody carnival, in order to invoke ethical repulsion and mobilize judgment of the partakers. As all of them took part in the catastrophe of humankind, all are now invited to become judges on its ruins, to mobilize their judgmental ability in lieu of arbitrary opinions. This powerful ethical impulse distinguishes Kraus’ drama from those of, on the one hand, Hugo von Hofmannsthal and, on the other, those of the avantgarde artists, although he takes recourse to both of them. Once again, as with the relationship to the personae and bourgeois drama, this recourse takes the form of a subversive imitation. He engages the baroque tradition of theatrum mundi as does Hofmannsthal but without the aim of bringing the traumatized humans back into the fold of divine providence or giving shelter to their embarrassing earthly destinies in the appeasing sacral order of the world. Hofmannsthal exculpates humankind by attributing horrors committed by the humans to the Supreme Will of the Conductor of commedia humana (Schäfer 220–221), a therapy diametrically opposed to that proposed by Kraus. Next to the tradition of the theatrum mundi, Kraus engages the techniques of collage and montage genuine to the avant-garde drama. He does so with the aim of preventing the comfortable consumption of a bourgeois illusion, like the avant-garde artists, but not to mobilize the collective impact of the theatre, as was their intention (Bürger 22). On the contrary, he abhors such social agenda. In a word, he hints to Hofmannsthal’s baroque theatrum mundi by enormously multiplying both the venues and the number of participants and hints to avant-garde theatrical techniques by composing his drama as a loosely connected collage of press clippings, but completely disfigures these techniques by using them. He does not exempt humans from responsibility for the world as Hofmannsthal does but, on the contrary, immerses them in it; and he does not mobilize the collective social and/or political actions as the avant-gardists do but, on the contrary, provokes an individual grief for such actions.

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If Kraus re-describes all the key constituents of the fin-de-siècle theatre practice—the author, the dramatis personae, the spectatorship, the genre of drama, the institution of the bourgeois theatre, the tradition of the theatrum mundi, and the avant-garde collage compositions—through the consistent deployment of subversive mimicry, then this peculiar technology of his authorial self obviously takes center stage in The Last Days of Humankind. Although Benjamin’s path-breaking essay from 1931 draws attention to the importance of this technology of Kraus’ self, it was hitherto mostly neglected in the reception of his drama. This is astonishing because it immediately associates the technology of the colonized’s self as affirmed by Homi Bhabha in his famous essay “Of Mimicry and Man” (Bhabha, The Location of Culture 94–132). In this essay, he argues that the colonized undermines the colonizer’s technologies of the self in the very act of applying them. This makes him or her a “subject of a difference that is almost the same but not quite” (122) and that, in his or her reiterated attempts to erase this difference, he or she cannot but reaffirm it. Although the Austrian Jews were certainly not colonized in the political and economic sense, one could defend the thesis that at the turn of the century they gradually became aware of the dispossession of their linguistic and cultural identity. As I have already mentioned, Gustav Mahler described himself as triply bereft of homeland: as a Czech among the Austrians, an Austrian among the Germans, and a Jew in the whole world (Beller 207). As Kraus once remarked of himself, he was “fated to dissolve entirely” into the surrounding cultures by being degraded to a pure “ferment” of disagreement in them (Eine Krone für Zion 23). In fact, it became obvious that the Jews never entirely dissolved into the Austrian culture but remained therein an “almost the same but not quite” element at the moment when neither their linguistic and cultural assimilation nor their religious conversion were able to save them from persecution. It is this constitutively ambivalent, internally exterior Jewish identity that Kraus spontaneously brings to the fore through his disruptive mimicry. In order to turn this inerasable Jewish difference from stigma into a ferment of humankind’s creation, in The Last Days of Humankind he continually exempts himself from that which his milieu establishes as the human standard. Humankind experiences its last days not only because its pattern of humanity proliferates the most terrible monsters but also because it dooms some human beings to live the life of “almost the same but not quite” creatures. It is in the name of these creatures that Kraus establishes his High Court of Justice. If this justice cheatingly crawls into humans by disfiguring them into monsters then this is because it works for the creatures sentenced to supra-human destiny. Kraus’ celebration of the spirit of creativity as the humanity’s foundation proves to be

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a march of revenge. Turning the inflicted wounds into the sources of redemption is a compensatory politics germane of all trauma narratives.

Two Irreconcilable Politics of Trauma

By developing the delineated self-exempting technologies of authoring their narratives, both Kraus and Andrić try to come to terms with their ‘internally exterior’ identities which the given historical and geopolitical circumstances unexpectedly confronted them with. The breakdown of the Habsburg Empire raised Kraus’ consciousness of his Jewish “zone of indistinction” in the same way as the dissolution of both the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires made Andrić aware of the ethnic, linguistic and cultural indistinctiveness of his multiple belonging. To exempt themselves from these political surroundings that had suddenly grown inimical, they shaped two divergent politics of authoring their selves. Kraus established his authorial self as the High Court of Justice that levels accusations against the humans in the name of sacrificed creatures. Andrić built up his authorial self as an impartial divine Judge that, in the name of eternal beauty, promises the presently antagonized identity distinctions future reconciliation and harmony. Both of these grandiose phantasies, put in the foundation of their self-exempting narratives, repudiate the geopolitically specific post-imperial traumas that gave birth to these narratives. By masking their personal investment, Andrić’s and Kraus’ narratives pretend to be acting for the benefit of the whole of humankind. Kraus denies the specific Jewish indistinction located at the very imperial center and Andrić, in his turn, the specific South Slav indistinction located at the godforsaken imperial margin. To remedy these traumas that they suppress, they develop phantasies of their selves as impartial judges. However, the juxtaposition of these phantasies generated in the same post-imperial space reveals their biased character. If eternal beauty dictates the law of humankind, how can this humankind incorporate the Jewish indistinction that was forced into activity precisely so as to escape the apparent equality of humans established by this beauty? And if the center’s activity establishes the law of humankind, then how can this humankind accommodate the South Slav indistinction that precisely this activity has destined to passivity in order to provide the prerequisites for its own functioning? Even if both of these politics of trauma are understandable on their own premises, neither of them remains valid for the whole of humanity. While they heal their own pain, they make others suffer.

Chapter 6

The Dis/location of Solitude: The Dispossession of the Paternal Protection in Joseph Roth’s The Radetzky March and Radomir Konstantinović’s Descartes’ Death

Solitude and Location

The condition of solitude, no matter whether it is coercive or intentional, collective or individual, disengages the rules of the community in which it comes into being. Inasmuch as it deactivates the political and social parameters of its location, it presents itself as a subversive operation of dislocation. However, in their turn, the political and social locations also contaminate the profile of the solitude that they host. This solitude and its location, therefore, operate as each other’s condition of impossibility: the solitude subverts its location, the location restricts the solitude that it generates. This state of affairs explains, for example, Carl Schorske’s dilemma concerning the Dual Monarchy’s collapse: Was it because the individuals […] contained in their own psyches some characteristics fundamentally incompatible with the social whole? Or was it the whole as such that distorted, paralyzed, and destroyed the individuals who composed it? Schorske 4

However, the constituencies that the Monarchy was expected to protect were not merely individuals but also collectivities such as provinces in which individuals were all but welcome. Despite their resistance to individualism, provinces were equally doomed to solitude and perceived their protectors equally ambiguously as individuals. Although politically located within respective empires, they were economically, socially and linguistically dislocated from these empires’ core zones. The researchers of various profiles increasingly interpret this asymmetry between the core and peripheries as the defining characteristics of empires. (Motyl 1996, Barkey 1996) In economic terms, an asymmetric interdependence existed between the Monarchy’s Western and Eastern parts since the latter were forced to supply the former with food and raw materials. (Barkey 106) Besides facilitating these imports, the much

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celebrated construction of the railroads in these provinces envisaged the subsequent export of the finished products in the opposite direction, which only deteriorated the economic imbalance still further (Berend 20–22). In social terms, the resulting lack of industry and urban centers left the Eastern parts’ bourgeoisie and industrial proletariat substantially less developed. Finally, in linguistic terms, when Austrian Emperor Joseph II introduced German instead of Latin as the language of the imperial administration in the 1780s, it is indeed true that his primary intention was to modernize rather than ‘nationalize’ his Empire.1 Nonetheless, in recognizing imperial German as more appropriate for this project than the empire’s other vernaculars, he anticipated the subsequent French ‘imperial’ imposition of linguistic uniformity as the prerequisite for a ‘national family’s’ political cohesion, efficiency and expediency (Vick 159).2 The message that underlay his policy reads: Only those imperial constituencies that succumb to the envisaged linguistic standardization become progressive and modern. Those that remain loyal to their mother tongues confine themselves to their ethnic spaces, excluding themselves from the universal process of civilization. Since they spoke imperial German, the Austrians did not experience themselves in ethnic but rather civic terms, which is why, from their point of view, it was solely the non-German speakers who were entrapped in ethnic backwardness (Cornwall 174–176).3 Following this logic of the paternal protection, the imperial administration applied different, much less democratic rules upon the provincial nationalities (Volksstämme) than upon the central nation. In the center, these rules stimulated the emergence of the future-oriented individual identities, in the provinces it fortified the past-addicted collective ones. The derogation inherent to the Habsburg administration of imperial provinces, however, enjoyed much wider dissemination, characterizing the manner in which representatives of the central imperial constituencies perceived and treated members of the provincial ones in their everyday interactions. The provincial identities were 1  Joseph II’s reputation as the great Germanizer is a retroactive effect of the late nineteenth century’s creative mythmaking as mobilized by both Hungarian and Slav nationalists (who blamed him) and German nationalists (who celebrated him) (Judson, The Habsburg Empire 55). 2  As Pieter Judson put it, “subjects of the Habsburg Monarchy were becoming citizens of the state well before the French Revolution had established a model of national citizenship in Europe” (The Habsburg Empire 77). 3  The same ‘egalitarian discrimination’ would be reapplied by the twentieth century’s ‘socialist empires’, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia (Brubaker, Nationalism reframed 23–54). Tito was knowingly called ‘the last Habsburg’ (which translates into the ‘enlightened absolutist’ in the form of Joseph II, admittedly, only in a benevolent interpretation).

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systematically bereft of any distinctiveness that would hinder the satisfying of the central agencies’ needs as well as the soothing of these agencies’ fears. Only by keeping them in such an indistinctive condition, could the central agencies use them as comfortable and adaptable ‘projection surfaces’. For example, in the introductory conversation of Hofmannsthal’s Rosenkavalier, Octavian calms down the Field Marshal’s wife, who is afraid that her husband will suddenly disrupt the sweet pleasures of her bedroom, that he hunts somewhere in the “Croatian forest” “behind Esseg in the Raitzenland” (Hofmannsthal, Dramen V 14). However, in Habsburg times, the term Raitzenland referred to the Orthodox parts of Vojvodina, religiously and culturally completely different from Catholic Croatia which, from the Western perspective, was, in addition, in front of Esseg. Just how foggy the idea of this imperial province was in the Viennese elites’ minds is also indicated by the reply of the Field Marshal’s Wife: “Is this surely very far away?” Being so remote and inarticulate, the provinces are also an abundant supply of exotic girls for the Austrian cavaliers without confronting these gentlemen with the moral and cultural obstacles that they would have to reckon with in the center. The Baron in the Rosenkavalier thus boasts that he keeps “two or three” Czech girls that come to help his staff with the summer harvest until November in order to cheerfully “mix with them” (26). If Austrian officers were relegated to the province for penitentiary reasons (the so-called Strafversetzung), they could nevertheless afford themselves the sort of amusement that would be unheard of in the center. In Ivo Andrić’s story Anika’s Times, situated in the remotest Bosnian province, two Austrian officers take a brief trip into nature with two scantily clad ladies, indulging in some erotic activities under the open sky in a scene that would be completely unimaginable in the Austrian society of that time. As Stefan Zweig notes in The World of Yesterday, no woman would dare to risk such indecent activities in a public place (Zweig 97). More importantly, the scandalous nature of this scene drives a local Orthodox priest to madness since, although recently widowed, he cannot control his fascination with the naked ‘female flesh’, hideously observing the scene (Andrić, The Slave Girl 364–372).4 In another of Andrić’s stories, Love 4  The same fascination with the naked but withheld “female flesh”—although they were of course approachable for their husbands, the wives of Orthodox priests used to hide their nakedness from them—drives the “maid’s butcher” Moosbrugger (a poor provincial road tramp) to madness in Musil’s The Man without Qualities (book I, ch. 18). “He could only watch the girls […]. Now, you only need imagine what it means. Something that you naturally covet like bread and water, you are only allowed to watch. After some time you covet it unnaturally.” (Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften 69) The analysis of this case by Musil’s narrator—a signum

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in the Kasaba, an Austrian officer, “not knowing what to do with the long evening hours” (5) in the Bosnian province, amuses himself by seducing a young Jewish girl whom he finally destroys, driving her to suicide. In this region which, due to the long Ottoman rule, was accustomed to religious segregation in romantic affairs, it was unimaginable that Jewish women would ‘mix’ with men of other confessions (Keyder 36). The ‘process of civilization’ obviously operated simultaneously as the central constituency’s refreshing meal and the provincial constituencies’ lethal poison. It perpetually aggrandized the lords’ self-consciousness and diminished that of the bondsmen. Isolating the provinces in their amorphous exotic character adapted to the jaded Austrians’ entertainment was, therefore, the imperial center’s broad and joint operation. Nevertheless these carefully protected “zones of indeterminacy” (Povinelli 3–4, 11–13) played an unexpectedly active part in undermining and disabling the envisaged paternal care. Their intended dislocation from the vibrant center into the godforsaken margins failed; they started to spread out from their confinement, contaminating and disarticulating the central constituency’s space. Thus, in the long run, Joseph II’s ‘benevolent’ imperialism induced fierce nationalisms.5 That is to say, his homogenization of the ‘great imperial family’ gave way to a variety of ‘imagined communities’ that punctuated and disrupted the imperial space (Appadurai 28, 33). These provinces operated as Foucault’s “heterotopias”, “contesting and inverting” the system that tried to lock them in as sorts of “inner colonies”. (Foucault, The Order 18) Due to the rise of such enclaves of non-official vernaculars, common folk came to identify themselves as a particular national group in ways that had previously been unimaginable. Strengthening the linguistic compartmentalization, Joseph II’s Germanization of the imperial space spawned a tide of ethnic nationalisms toward the end of century. Hence without the rise of the German and thereafter temporis in his view—is, of course, much more extensive in this novel of over 1000 pages. And so time and again he returns to it. In Andrić’s novella, published one year after the first volume of The Man without Qualities, i.e. 1931, the description of this strange occurrence is rather sketchy and its analysis has been almost completely skipped. Although such ‘psychic aberrations’ repeatedly attracted Andrić’s attention, he never tried to track down their private background, preferring to leave this kind of ‘gossiping’ to his (mostly female) figures. If Musil delves into the private secrets of such psychic breakdowns, Andrić only examines their public echoes, ramifications and consequences. In a manner typical of a writer from the imperial province (including Roth!), he prefers safe epic distance from the characters over their meticulous novelistic analysis as is characteristic of Musil as the imperial center’s writer. For a seminal analysis of Andrić’s “poetics of secrecy”, see Katušić. 5  For the rise of more official usage of vernacular languages like Croatian, Czech and Romanian in the aftermath of Joseph II’s reforms, see Evans 2006.

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Hungarian languages to hegemonic statuses within the Empire, the subordinate imperial constituencies would have lacked the common background against which to identify themselves as ‘nations’ and, concomitantly, lay claim to equal rights. (Cornwall 174–175) In addition, these claims were carried by the elites that were, at the first step, educated in imperially established provincial schools6 and, at the second step, in the centers themselves. Unknowingly and involuntarily, the Empire raised the vipers in its own bosom.7 By orienting its provinces to export food and raw materials to the center, the Empire unwillingly undermined itself in economic terms too. This orientation paved the way for provincial riches by gradually enabling them to invest in the meanwhile impoverished nobility in the imperial center. Thus in Hofmannsthal’s Arabella, in the sinister atmosphere of the Monarchy’s military and economic collapse during the 1860s, which in turn spawned the so-called “gay apocalypse” in the turn-of-the-century Vienna (Broch, Hofmannsthal und seine Zeit 40–48) in which this comedy is set, the extraordinarily wealthy Slavonian landlord Mandryka rescues the impoverished Austrian count Waldner who has been torn apart by his passion for gambling. The centurieslong patron and patronized suddenly exchange roles. These positions’ constitutive interchangeability interrogates their self-sufficiencies that putatively exclude each other. That which was seemingly excluded re-enters the excluder by drawing him/her into the relation of co-implication. Both an empire’s core and peripheries are divided into elites and populations; they are all but homogeneous. (Motyl 20) Although the central and provincial constituencies, after the breakdown of the political entity that lodged them both for centuries, used to blame each other for the catastrophe, the delineated resurfacing of the empire’s structural gap amidst their identities questions the plausibility of such unilateral interpretations. It hints at a deeper problem that encompasses and surpasses both the central and provincial constituencies, blurring their apparent distinctiveness. 6  The Young Turks who brought the Ottoman Empire to its collapse were, for their part, likewise educated in Ottoman schools, which trained the elite for imperial services (Keyder 37). 7  Judson, for example, states that distinctive forms of nationalism were “forged in the context of Habsburg imperial institutions and in the possibilities these institutions foresaw” (The Habsburg Empire 452). Barkey cautions that the new nation-states’ elites “have been trained, socialized and politicized in the context of empire and have become elites through functioning within the empire” (Barkey 110). The same holds true for the emergence of the so-called patrimonial crisis in the Ottoman Empire. Keyder claims that the same wave of commercialization and monetization” that contributed to the modernization and unification of the Ottoman Empire eventually brought about various nation-based movements intent on separation from the empire” (Keyder 32).

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While the mutual tarrying of these two constituencies was comprehensible in the enflamed atmosphere of the immediate post-imperial decades,8 it makes much less sense in the recent historiography focusing on the breakdown of empires and also the reception of literary works on this subject. The cases I want to investigate in this connection are Joseph Roth’s novel The Radetzky March (1932) and Radomir Konstantinović’s novel Descartes’ Death (Dekartova smrt, 1996). Both novels emerge in the aftermath of political catastrophes, i.e. the breakdowns of Dual Monarchy and Yugoslavia, investigating their reflections on the families’ private lives as well as the reflections of the ruined family lives on the collapse of respective states. The Dual Monarchy’s catastrophe introduces the post-imperial and the Yugoslav one the post-post-imperial age in Central and East South Europe respectively. In both novels the two axes of paternal protection—the state-political and the familial one—reflect each other by simultaneously functioning as each other’s condition of impossibility. Both Roth and Konstantinović structure their novels in such a way so as to remind us that neither of these axes act in their own terms but rather with an unintended and sometimes even undesirable dependence upon each other. We must add to these paternal axes, however, the narrator’s attitude to the figures because it is, equally unwittingly, closely interrelated with them. Being as complex as Roth’s The Radetzky March and Konstantinović’s Descartes’ Death happen to be thanks to the indicated overlapping of various axes in their structure, these novels resist unilateral readings. In what follows, I will read them against their interpretations thus far, which were predominantly entrapped within either the protector’s or the protégé’s point of view by blindly repeating the above sketched compulsive logic of mutual blaming.

8  For the East-Central European collage of national rivalries and animosities after the First World War see Kożuchowski 1–22. The successor states blamed the new states for the breakdown of empires and the new states blamed the old empire for their long-term oppression under the banner of tolerant pluralism. On the one hand, this conflict between them resurfaces within the new nation states. As Berend puts it: “Thus oppression and injustice continued, but with a reversed hierarchy. Members of former dominating nations became minorities, and the new dominating nations sought retribution for past grievances” (187). On the other hand, the successor states’ internationalism implies a similar role reversal: “The dynasty had indeed once been committed to a political and religious absolutism. But now the logic of the situation led it to be the patron of a pluralistic and tolerant society” (Gellner 12).

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Joseph Roth’s The Radetzky March

In spite of the monarchist opinions occasionally put forth in Roth’s journalist work, my claim is that the novel’s complex structure resists its reading in any ideological frame.9 At closer inspection, it portrays its main characters as firmly encapsulated by solitude. This solitude is represented as a grave condition that governs their communication with other characters. The elderly Emperor who approaches his provincial “sons” absent-mindedly, indifferently and negligently is the epitome of such figures of inaccessible loneliness. Of course, disinterestedness suits the supreme position in any political hierarchy and is therefore hardly astonishing.10 The Emperor, however, appears to be absent-minded not only in relation to the provincials but also to his own self. An agency appointed to rule the whole empire—as omnipresent among its inhabitants as God is in the world11—is not exactly sovereign. On the contrary, the Emperor who is responsible for the well-being of millions of people, leaves the impression of an extremely distracted person. At the age at which he enters this novel, he has ceased to master even his own self.

9  For a recent summary of the novel’s dominant reception in such a frame see Kożuchowski, 112–21. The historian Kożuchowski himself subscribes to it. For the thesis of the elective affinity between Roth’s and Grillparzer’s monarchism see Nürnberger 88–97 and Bronsen 1988. For an overview of Roth’s reception see Kraske 1988. For a more recent reception see, for example, Pazi 1993 and Rosenfeld 2001. I endorse Claudio Magris’ opinion that in his literature, perhaps unconsciously, Roth overcomes the narrowness of the political and ideological views that were expressed in his journalist work. This particularly holds for The Radetzky March because his later works, written under the growing threat of Nazism, become more and more nostalgic. Even if “man Roth” writes monarchist articles simultaneously with The Radetzky March, the writer Roth cannot be interpreted as a “prisoner of ideological boundaries” (Magris 259). It would be wrong, however, to give too much credence to “man Roth’s” opinions either. They underwent fundamental changes and were heavily dependent on historical, political and pragmatic circumstances. As Magris (258) rightly puts it: “He was an eternal youth and never rose to the realm of ideas; they remained for him only occasions and animation means, effects and costumes for his momentary state of mind.” He engaged his various circumstantially induced opinions, or ideological roles for that matter, to animate his various figures—sometimes even one and the same figure, as we will come to see. 10  For a classic study of the ruler’s aloof loneliness see Leo Strauss’s On Tyranny. 11   The Radetzky March 75; Radetzkymarsch 86. In the following text, the first parenthesized number refers to the page in Michael Hofmann’s English translation of Roth’s The Radetzky March, and the second, italicized and separated by a semicolon, to the German original.

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Portrayed on innumerous public walls and reproduced on coins and stamps as coffered up in the “crystalline armor” of his “icy and everlasting, silver and dreadful old age,”12 he casts a tough and freezing glance at his subjects (75; 85–6). Remote and unapproachable, his face lacks personality and familiarity. Under such conditions, some subjects remove his portrait from their walls (109; 124) and others consider him to have definitely been abandoned by God (176; 196). Even to the Emperor himself, God starts to appear as mysterious as he himself regularly appeared to his soldiers (240; 267). The Emperor had a feeling as if he was drifting away from them, as though they were all shrinking and “the things they said reached his ear from a vast distance and then bounced away meaninglessly” (243; 273). This increasing distance from his subjects renders him unable to listen to his visitors and interlocutors carefully. During an inspection of his troops in Ukraine, he thus promotes a barber from Olmütz from a corporal into a sergeant completely against the man’s will and wish. Although, in doing so, he destroyed the barber’s life, the narrator presents him as extremely pleased for having accomplished a great deed and made the barber happy (242; 269). As such, the Emperor’s profile has a wide impact within the novel. His officers of provincial origin, while unreservedly committed to him, display an analogously radical solitude, resuming the Emperor’s humiliating disregard toward the “provincials” in an even stronger form. In the way this novel represents its characters, it guides its reader to the conclusion that the desperate dislocation of some imposes an equally devastating location on the others, and vice versa. Is the proliferation of solitudes an unavoidable corollary of the divided imperial coexistence? Their mutual instigating resurfaces in all relations between The Radetzky March’s main characters as well as between its main and minor characters. The novel obsessively returns to the complex relationship between the imposed mobility and immobility, i.e. the solitudes of Austrians and provincials, those of the dominating supranational individuals and of the dominated national and workers’ collectivities. As these solitudes foster one another, The Radetzky March makes an uneven distribution of sympathies between them obsolete, which seriously questions its much trumpeted nostalgic character.13 12   Hofmann translates “in seiner eisernen und ewigen, silbernen und schrecklichen Greisenhaftigkeit eingeschlossen” as “coffered up in an icy and everlasting old age”, astonishingly dropping “silver and dreadful”. 13  For a recent reading of the novel along more ambiguous lines, see Foteva 173–95. Foteva, however, does not address the problem of the dis/located solitude that figures centrally in my reading.

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Following three generations of a typical imperial family, the Trottas, Roth lets their solitudes deepen rather than ameliorate one another. Having been ennobled after saving the Emperor’s life at the battle of Solferino (1859), Baron Joseph von Trotta breaks off his personal relationship with his immobile Slovenian father, concealing him from his Bohemian wife out of provincial shame. After having renounced his family father in favor of a political one, he, in his own role as a father, in a typical gesture of repetition compulsion, quits personal relationship with his own son, raising him toughly and coldly. This guides his son to repeat the same gesture toward him, attaching himself to the Emperor instead. Raised by the Baron in such an impersonal way, District Commissioner Franz Trotta, as the father, reproduces the same attitude to his son Carl, who, for his own part, also chooses to admire his grandfather and the Emperor instead. It appears that within the frame of the Habsburg Empire, the family could only ensure its external reputation if it consented to its internal discontinuation. The narrator reminds us, as if pointing out the price of the Big Father’s love, that a “great chain of hills” separated the Captain from his son (170; 188) just as they also did for the Baron and his father (8; 11).14 The Dual Monarchy’s officers of provincial origin had to detach themselves from taking care of their family bonds, since attachment to one’s original family was considered provincial behavior. If one wanted to overcome it, one was expected to abandon this “primitive” loyalty in favor of binding oneself to the Emperor. Families could only improve their social status in this way and it required a mobility from their members across various imperial provinces, often located great distances from their family’s home. Once cut off from their geographic, social, cultural and linguistic roots, the Emperor’s supranational officers were compelled to live free-floating, dislocate lives. The development of their careers affiliated them to locations that lacked their emotional attachment and, in their turn, regarded these settlers as foreigners. The novel carefully investigates how the protagonists’ feeling of non-belonging and their distrustful reception by the new surrounding generates their unbearable solitude and concomitant attempts to come to grips with it. There seems to be no exception to this rule. After having fought for His Emperor and become a military invalid, Baron Trotta’s father, born in the Slovenian town Sipolje, became a gardener at the Emperor’s Laxenburg castle in Lower Austria, which was, incidentally or not, a surrogate ambience for his indigenous one. Baron Trotta himself, disappointed with the Emperor’s mendacious 14  In the latter case, Hofmann translates “schwerer Berg [lit. severe mountain] militärischer Grade” as “a great weight of military distinction”.

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administration, withdrew from the military service in southern Hungary that confronted him with mistrust and gossip (5; 8) into a silent Bohemian landscape. The District Commissioner Trotta, for his part, was sent to Silesia and then Moravia, whereupon, faced with complete isolation, he undertakes a trip to Ukraine to reestablish a personal relationship with his endangered son. Lieutenant Trotta was allocated to Moravia and then Ukraine where, after quitting his embarrassing military service, he tries to integrate into the domestic peasant population. At the beginning of their appointment to various provinces, however, neither of the Trottas cares to identify his exact new location. They want their provincial surroundings to remain indistinctive in order to project onto them the self-pleasing, therapeutic fantasies of their solitude without facing resistance from the domestic population. Only after this resistance arises and the provincials announce their dissatisfaction with their imposed identity, do the Trottas become frustrated with their dislocation. Yet even then, they prove unwilling to approach the provincials whom they are responsible for in distinctive terms, instead continuing to heal their dislocation through a stubborn detachment. In demonstrating such an obstinate blindness towards the perspective of the provincials who they are expected to take care of, they unknowingly redouble the Emperor’s utter disinterest in his subjects as exemplified, amongst everything else, by the aforementioned treatment of the Ukrainian barber. This compulsively reemerging ignorance deserves closer examination since it manifests itself diversely. To recover from his frustrating south Hungarian appointment, Baron Trotta withdraws into his Bohemian refuge because he confuses it with his “native” Slovenia. The narrator states twice that he became “a little Slovenian peasant,” (14; 18, 19) as if taking up the protagonist’s indistinctive point of view.15 In a sudden outburst of anger induced by his unbearably divided identity, the Baron renounces his Imperial Father, reattaching himself to his Slovenian one. Yet although it now seems that he definitely quits his relation to the Emperor, his loyalty to him proves irrevocable. Despite the Baron’s intention to reintegrate, his rapid ageing and the isolation caused by the consecutive deaths of this father, wife and father-in-law redouble the Emperor’s traumatic self-enclosure.16 He also reminds us, through his inability to remember the face of his recently deceased wife (19; 24), of the Emperor’s notorious 15  “As if” because the narrator himself does not really distinguish between various imperial provinces, treating them habitually “summarily”. I will return to his unplanned resuming of the characters’ behavior in my conclusion. 16  As is known, the Emperor’s only son committed suicide, the Mexicans executed his brother, an Italian anarchist assassinated his beloved wife, and a member of a Serbian

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forgetfulness as well as, by his growing habit of treating his own portrait as the only interlocutor that remained him (18; 23), of the Emperor’s self-seclusion. Finally, the Emperor is most exemplarily resurrected in the Baron’s disregard for the personality of fellow beings. They must unconditionally obey his traumatic self-enclosure, above all his son Franz to whom both the military career of his father and the desired return to the peasant life of his grandfather are strictly forbidden (17, 19; 22, 24). The Baron’s unwilling reduplication of the Emperor makes his attempted return to his familial father fail. The very structure of the Dual Monarchy, circling around its absent center, prevented its subjects’ return to their personal mutual relationships. The attachment to the impersonal Common Father, hammered into imperial subjects’ consciousnesses through the daily rituals of identity-formation, sentenced any attempt at personal belonging to failure. The novel obstinately reminds us that the Emperor’s portrait supervised his subjects from all public walls, coins and stamps, and that the performance of the Radetzky March was notorious at all public occasions. It sounds at the Baron’s funeral as well as that of his Slovenian father (20; 25). All concerts on the main square of Commissioner Trotta’s small district town in Moravia began with it (23; 27); it was even played in brothels (81; 92) and public bars (109; 124). It is no wonder, then, that the young Carl Joseph imagines his future death for the Emperor as followed by the tones of the Radetzky March (26; 32) and that his patriotic fantasies at the Corpus Christi procession are warmed up by the same music (210; 235). The contact with the omnipresent Emperor’s portrait sometimes takes a detour via the portrait of his representatives, such as that of Baron Trotta’s, which supervises his grandson from afar with equal persistence (70, 104; 79, 118). Since every officer is but an embodiment of the Emperor, when the grandson inherits the Baron’s qualities, he ultimately inherits those of the Emperor. The Impersonal and Indifferent Father thus spectrally multiplies in all his subjects. Commissioner Trotta even inadvertently imitates his famous “elastic stride” (168; 186–87). The narrator does not let us escape his irony. Inheriting his personal father’s disrespect of the other’s personality, District Commissioner Trotta also indirectly reaffirms the aloofness of the Supreme Father. The Commissioner’s disrespect holds not only for his relation to the son but also for all his other social relations. For example, Bandleader Nechwal’s wife and children are not deemed worthy of his exact memorizing (31; 37). As regards his other provincial subordinate, Sergeant Slama, he silently passes liberation movement assassinated the heir to his throne. For his traumatic self-enclosure, see Kożuchowski (163–64).

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over the affair of his son with the Sergeant’s wife and expects Slama to do the same, as if provincial wives are somehow “naturally” apt for the sexual initiation of the Emperor’s youth. Due to his mother’s early death and his predominantly motherless childhood (repeated by his son), District Commissioner Trotta does not hold women in high esteem. As they are expected to satisfy men’s appetites, in a conversation with his only friend in his late age, Doctor Skovronnek, he designates the unknown woman who caused his son’s fatal passion as a “person of the opposite sex” (Frauenperson), reserving the concept of a “lady” (Dame) only for females that a man intends to marry (263; 291). The same despising is afforded to his house staff, i.e. his housekeeper madam Hirschwitz and, and at least initially, his butler Jacques. After the latter dies, Commissioner Trotta tries, in a similar “self-evident” vein, to impose the name Jacques (invented by his father, decades ago, as a “noble” nickname) upon his newly hired successors and wonders why they refuse to accept it (unlike the “original Jacques,” 251; 277). The same ignorance concerns the Commissioner’s relation to the imperial provinces’ exact location. He refuses his son’s wish to continue his military service at the Empire’s “Southern frontier” in Slovenia (because an Austrian officer must remain cut off from his place of origin, 138; 151), directing him instead to its “Northern sister” Ukraine (138; 152). At that time, incidentally, the Empire’s Southern frontier was Dalmatia, while Ukraine could only be its “Eastern” and not “Northern sister”.17 Yet a supranational Austrian servant, as a true copy of the Distracted Supervisor, was not expected or even allowed to distinguish between the various “Slav tribes”. One must not address them by their individual names but exclusively by their collective name, i.e. as “Slavs” instead of as “Russians or Serbs” (154; 170).18 This is why the District Commissioner resolutely refused the distinct national claims of particular “Slav tribes,” treating them as a typically revolutionary disobedience by ignorant “sons” to their Benevolent Father (155; 17  Once again, it is unclear who in the last instance allocates Slovenia to the South and Ukraine to the North of the Monarchy, Commissioner Trotta as a focalizer or the narrator. As I have pointed out above, both are equally ignorant of the exact location of imperial provinces, confusing them unconcernedly with each other. I will return to the narrator’s redoubling of his protagonists’ detachment from the surrounding in my conclusion. 18  This can be understood as a continuation of Herder’s benevolent treatment of the Slavs as itinerant peoples “taking up a much larger space on earth than in history.” Because nature denied them “nobler gifts,” attributing them instead a terrible “slavish inertia,” Herder obliges the Germans as the carriers of humankind’s history to protect and cultivate them (Herder, Ideen 696–698). Toward the end of the nineteenth century the Dual Monarchy, in order to prevent its disintegration, switched to the new administration of its provinces along these lines.

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171). Using his immediate provincial ethnic surrounding as a metonymy for all irrational barbarians, he identifies all rebelling nations with “unruly, stubborn and stupid” Czechs who proliferate everywhere (252; 278). In a conversation with Nechwal’s son, who pays him a visit, his guest’s face strikes him as typically “Czech”, i.e. reminding him of an “animal” (255–56; 282). Heavily disappointed with the invasion of “barbarians” that bring the world of the Radetzky March to collapse, he rapidly ages, drawing ever nearer to his Emperor until, perceived as “the ghost of the history of the fatherland” (302; 336), he almost looks like the Emperor’s younger brother (307, 309; 341, 343). Indeed, he increasingly sees the world in the same amorphous manner as the Emperor who perceives Ukrainian Jews as the “strange black grain in the wind”, a “black rout” that approaches Him who absent-mindedly rides his horse, and for who knows what reason (242–43; 270). Increasingly, the Emperor’s eyes used to look into the distance, where the edges of eternity appeared, so that everything in his close proximity was blurred. He even overlooked a crystalline drop on the end of his nose that everybody else was staring at (247; 276). The same negligence concerning his own appearance happens to Commissioner Trotta whom the Emperor’s cynical officials perceive as if having arrived into their present “from a historically distant province” (302; 336). Both these distracted “living dead,” the Emperor and Commissioner Trotta, suddenly become distant provincials within the same Empire that had offered them the most central accommodation just several years earlier. The world they blindly trusted becomes completely strange, catapulting them out of their privileged location. While Commissioner Trotta tries to reconnect with his son in order to regain the abruptly lost site in life, he faces a series of traumas, redoubling like a typical “imperial clone” the analogous experience of his father and, via him, the Emperor himself. He consecutively learns about his son’s unheroic death (351; 391), the mental breakdown of his son’s mentor Count Chojnicki, who is now housed in an asylum (358; 398), and finally the prosaic death of the Emperor (360–61; 400–401), from whom, during the requested audience, he had vainly expected a personal exchange (306–09; 339–343). Yet for His Majesty he remains the same weak echo of déjà vu others that fellow beings were for the Commissioner himself for many decades and that the Commissioner ultimately becomes for other people (including his own son who perceives him as the Emperor’s copy; 185; 206). In the world of the Great Mediator who multiplies his doubles everywhere, even the people closest to one another fail in their attempts to establish personal mutual relationships. Commissioner Trotta twice wishes to tell his son that he loves him but, inhibited as he is, cannot enact this wish (170, 186; 189, 207). Even in communication with his friend Doctor Skovronnek he cannot find the right word to enter into an intimate conversation (259; 286).

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The third Trotta, Lieutenant Carl Joseph, redoubles for his part the grandfather whom he perceives as his true father since he experiences his actual father as a foreigner (66, 185; 75, 206). This is, after all, the father’s fault because Commissioner Trotta directed his son to continue Baron Trotta’s military career in order to make his own castrated wish come true. By being the Baron’s remote copy, the Lieutenant resumes the Baron’s non-belonging within the milieu of his military appointment (77, 227; 87, 252), driving his relation to the Emperor into a similar ambiguity. On the one hand, he manifests unreserved loyalty, deeply admires his Emperor (26, 210–11; 32, 234), and rescues him from humiliation in the Madam Resi’s brothel (82; 93) and the Ukrainian garrison (328; 364–65). On the other hand, the Emperor strikes him as a complete foreigner (76, 185, 328; 86, 206, 364) who deserves only indifference and pity (246; 275). Divided like his grandfather, he yearns for a return to the native Sipolje of his forebears, a location that he imagines in equally blurred terms. As a true descendant of his grandfather, the Lieutenant does not really distinguish between the Czech and Slovenian peasants and languages (66; 74–5), but adds to his forebear’s ignorance a touch further. By imagining mosques and praying Moslems as constitutive parts of Sipolje (124; 140), he confuses Slovenia with newly occupied Bosnia and Herzegovina. He beats his grandfather’s disinterest for the others in some other respects too by depriving all women that attract him of distinctive personalities, i.e. madams Slama, Demant and Taußig. The Lieutenant learns of them via their husbands, approaches them as substitutes for his early deceased mother, and, in his clumsy treatment of them, redoubles his young father who, according to his former classmate, the painter Moser, was extremely shy with the lasses (48; 56). As for subordinates from the lower social strata, he treats his Ukrainian servant Onufri in an even less personal manner than how his father handled his butler Jacques. Both Onufri and Jacques are certainly destined to fulfill the literal and symbolic wishes of their masters. Yet the Lieutenant cannot memorize Onufri’s strange Slav name (68; 77), cannot bear to direct his gaze at Onufri’s provincial face, and therefore does not really know what Onufri looks like until he finally learns his name (69; 78). After all, his teeth remind him of a horse (68; 77) and his behavior of a bear (71; 80). This contempt for “lower” beings beats that of his father because, unlike the Ukrainian Onufri, Jacques is supranational “family property,” and also because Lieutenant Trotta is, unlike the “true Austrian” his father (28, 138; 34, 152), dispossessed of his identity from the outset. In fact, the gaze of his furious grandfather directed at his neck consistently irritates him (70, 104, 328; 79, 118, 364). He also feels continually haunted by numerous deceased beings who seem to be blaming him (such as his mother, the surrogate mother Madam Slama, his friend Max Demant, Jacques and the

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striking workers, as well as his own buried self; 42, 171, 183, 232, 275, 337; 48, 189, 204, 258, 305, 375). Besides, instead of representing himself, in relation to madams Slama, Demant, and Taußig, he usurps the roles of their husbands, in relation to the Emperor the role of his grandfather, in relation to Count Chojnicki the role of the son, in relation to his father, who suddenly strikes him as his son, the role of the father (333; 371), and in his relation to Doctor Demant he prefigures his father’s relation to Doctor Skovronnek. Feverishly searching for the proper location of his identity, he also compulsively identifies with inferior grandsons (i.e. Doctor Demant who admires his grandfather, as the Lieutenant does his; 110; 125). In the outcome, he increasingly feels from the outset to have been an instrument of inimical and disastrous destiny (122, 281–82; 138, 313). In order to get rid of such an unbearable othering of his own personality, he compulsively dispossesses the others of their personality by imposing on them his remedial fantasies. In this novel however, the absent center of the Dual Monarchy does not only push the Trottas and those who depend on them, such as their fathers, sons, grandsons, wives, mistresses, servants, friends, and provincial subordinates, into irrevocable solitude. Consider the case of the rich and independent Polish landowner Count Chojnicki, a figure from the group of so-called frontier men (Grenzmenschen) located at the Empire’s Eastern margin, i.e. Ukraine’s periphery with Russia. He is described as an extremely mobile person, a “migrant bird” familiar with many regions, metropolises, social and political milieus, a strange fellow with innumerous acquaintances but no single friend or enemy, a man of oscillating moods, belonging at the same time to the center and the province; in a word, an “alchemist” who merges all manner of various identities (146, 174; 162, 194). As Roth himself was born at the Eastern frontier of the Empire, many commentators pointed out his continuous sympathy towards these kind of people.19 Besides, Chojnicki’s antidemocratic and monarchic worldview (148, 184; 164–65, 205) apparently sides with Roth’s opinion expressed in his journalistic work. Yet neither Count Chojnicki’s nor Roth’s worldview (as articulated in this novel) are that simple. Chojnicki despises and spits on the “new nations” (the Austrians, Hungarians, Czechs, Ruthenians, Croats, Slovenes, Poles, and Jews) as well as on the dispossessed working class that does not want to work anymore (149; 165). However, he also calls the Emperor a “senile idiot (ein gedankenloser Greis),” the government “a bunch of morons,” and the parliament an “assembly of credulous and pathetic nitwits”. The Empire is, he states, in such a terrible condition that 19  Roth locates the concluding happenings in his novel at the small Ukrainian town of B. near to the Russian border. This fit his birthplace of Brody.

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it must perish (148; 164). It has lost contact with historical development and misapprehended the key agenda of modernity: nation and technology (176–77; 195–97). In sum, Chojnicki, as the Lieutenant’s second father (179; 199), shares with his true father merely a scorn for democracy and nations, but is much more critical toward the Monarchy. Being dis/located both at its center and its frontier (like Roth himself), he unmistakably senses its impending catastrophe. As a frontier man who, unlike the District Commissioner who is firmly located at the Monarchy’s center, rejects all values almost to the verge of nihilism, the Count would most probably commit suicide were he not an extremely curious reader of catastrophe’s announcements. Catapulted out of all comfortable identity locations, he remained in life out of sheer curiosity for what was going to happen (171; 190)! In distinction to the Monarchy’s self-aggrandizing ceremonial center, that is to say, at its denigrated ruined frontier, you can clearly discern the omens of the forthcoming decline (141, 179; 156, 199). Ultimately, whereas the centrally located Viennese enjoy the Monarchy’s cheerful end time without the slightest presentiment of its approaching breakdown (211–12; 235–36), Count Chojnicki’s dislocated clairvoyance drives him into a mental asylum (356; 396). This is the sad life trajectory of probably the most attractive frontier man in the novel, but the respective group is, as one might expect, extremely heterogeneous. Other representatives of the frontier men embody the Ukrainian province’s other dangerous advantages. The smuggler Kapturak is fleeing from Russia where the secret service is chasing him because of trading with deserters, the same activity that he comfortably and lucratively pursues in Habsburg Ukraine. The hotel owner Brodnitzer, who has arrived in Ukraine from Silesia for dubious reasons, opens a casino and offers girls (189–90; 208–10). Contrary to the generous benefactor Count, these petty settlers draw huge profits from the Empire’s approaching catastrophe.20 While the independent and 20  Roth’s narrator does not share the enthusiasm held by the simple people for their benefactors. In the same way that receiving an act of charity, satisfies these people’s desire for a magnanimous master, the benefactor, committing this act, nourishes his conscience and pride. See the narrator‘s explanation of Count Morstin in Roth’s novella “Die Büste des Kaisers” in Die Erzählungen 177. Although The Radetzky March does not contain such direct explanations, the narrator’s attitude to Count Chojnicki is just as ambiguous. He is equally unwilling to make concessions to his figures as is Musil’s narrator in The Man Without Qualities, who in his turn ironizes the human inclination to make “a premature compromise with conscience at the expense of the matter” or “to avoid evil and do good for oneself rather than endeavor to find out the order of the whole” (Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften 27). Here and in the following all translations from German and the South Slavic languages are my own unless otherwise specified.

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well-positioned landowner Chojnicki is mobile, their problematic past and lucrative present bind them to this frontier zone, which they do not belong to and which, for its part, considering their murky business, does not welcome them. This forces them into a growing isolation and the stigma of foreignness that culminate with Kapturak’s expulsion and the prohibition of Brodnitzer’s casino (311; 345). In fact, the foreigners can never really understand the “swamp” of the frontier, an epitome of dislocation without the clearly established rules of behavior genuine to locations (141; 155–56). In its small towns, streets are without names and houses are without numbers (143; 158). This “forgotten world,” covered by the “dust of centuries” and accompanied by the “incessant fat chirruping of frogs” (141, 222; 155, 247), even aggravates the amorphousness of the province from which the Trottas are at continuous pains to keep a distance. When Commissioner Trotta undertakes a journey to his Monarchy’s remotest province, he packs a revolver to protect himself from bears and wolfs, one of numerous perils there that endanger a “civilized Austrian”(167; 185). Austrian officials only arrive in this penal colony on account of the most embarrassing misconduct (167; 185). It resolutely resists all of the democratic changes characteristic of the center (184; 205). This outmost dislocation that hosts the “last of all the stations in the Monarchy” (142; 157) swallows the lives of uninitiated settlers, soldiers and officers (141; 155–56), while the natives circulate across it as the “living ghosts” “jammed in” between “West and East,” “day and night” (139; 154), struggling to come to grips with its indeterminacy. To outmaneuver the perilous tricks of this godforsaken transit zone crisscrossed by the most diverse of earthly interests, they develop techniques of trading, smuggling, negotiating, usury and spying, or offer various hospitality services (such as hotels, taverns, salons, brothels, casinos, post offices and banks). Among the traders, bankers and caterers, the Jewish population is most representative (141; 155). In Commissioner Trotta’s typically anxious imagination before his Ukraine trip, the Ukrainian Jews “waged an incessant campaign of rapine” against foreign property and belongings (167; 185). Yet in the memory of Lieutenant Trotta’s friend Max Demant, who stems from this region, his Jewish grandfather, with a huge silver beard, sitting in his tavern and waiting for his customers, was beloved by all but anxious that his progeny will betray his legacy (84–5; 95–6). In fact, the upcoming change to the world takes care that only a few Jews of his sort survive into the twentieth century (340; 378) and, as they entrust their protector, the Emperor, on his inspection of troops in Ukraine, they have no doubts that the end of the world is approaching (243; 271). After Ukraine lost the Emperor’s protection, the specific Jewish dislocation within its general provincial dislocation became disastrous indeed. Ukraine’s

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terrible provincial solitude drove the Jews into an even more frightening ethnic solitude.21 If a Ukrainian identity was regularly confused with other provincial identities, the Jewish identity was, in the Ukrainian defensive reaction against this accumulated denigration, sentenced to erasure. Consider also that Roth finished his novel in Berlin shortly before the Nazis seized power. As if contributing to the delineated diversity of the frontier men, the narrator himself inhabits the historical in place of their geopolitical frontier. He is divided between the yesterday world of before the First World War about which he writes and the present world of after the war in which he writes, and never tires of reminding the reader of this predicament. Such a position is analogous to that of Stefan Zweig who finished The World of Yesterday (orig. 1942) ten years after Roth. Drawn into the traumatic solitude of emigration, Zweig also incessantly compares the past and present worlds but with an emphasis on the traumatic fate of the Jews, which, of course, also became his personal destiny. Yet while he personally testifies in his memoirs, Roth’s novelistic narrator is impersonal, an old-fashioned mediator of past events. He behaves like a typical epic narrator who never addresses his protagonists, since they do not belong to his world anymore, but exclusively his readers.22 Taking advantage of his historically later position, behind the back of the protagonists whom he permanently ironizes because of their shortsightedness and naivety, he enters with the readers into a kind of initiated partnership. For instance, he objects to his characters on the basis that:

21  The name of Ukraine means something marginal, at the edge of visibility, from a Russian perspective obviously, but the latter applies to the Habsburg point of view as well. 22  For these characteristics of the premodern epic as opposed to the modern novelistic narrator, see Cavarero 39. Cavarero polemicizes against Arendt’s epic understanding of the narrative by opting for its novelistic understanding. By introducing the epic narrator into his novel, Roth bereaves his figures of the possibility of shaping their own life trajectory, which was genuine to the novel’s protagonists, by making them sheer toys of predetermined fate. Hofmannsthal applies an analogously anachronous technique by introducing the typically baroque figure of the fortune-teller into his lyric comedy “Arabella” (finished in the same year as The Radetzky March). Such fatalism finds its explanation in the atmosphere of the 1930s, after the First World War destroyed the nineteenth century’s optimistic conviction that the human is the carrier of his history. This idea, of course, first became problematic in the imperial provinces, in which Roth places the action of his novel and where he was born. Taking recourse to an “antiquated” epic technique—in the same way as Hofmannsthal in his lyric comedy or Brecht in his contemporaneous epic theatre reach for an “anachronous” baroque technique—Roth simultaneously prevents his readers from identifying with the novelistic characters.

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None of the Austrian officers were able to hear the machinery of the great hidden mills that were already beginning to grind out the Great War (98; 111); the Ruthenian peasants did not know that the Empress died many years ago (133; 150); Commissioner Trotta did not know that Fate was spinning more sorrow for him while he slept (269; 298); Lieutenant Trotta overheard the grim wing-flap of the vultures that circled above the Habsburg double eagle (212; 235); the Emperor himself, ultimately, failed to notice that a crystalline drop appeared on the end of his nose (247; 276). Along with introducing his readers in this way to the benightedness of his protagonists, Roth’s narrator directly compares the past time about which he writes (1859–1914) with the present which he shares with his contemporary readers (1932). For example, he remarks that in the Dual Monarchy a deceased person habitually entered a long memory whereas in the accelerated nationstates he or she is quickly forgotten (120; 136). In addition, the prior concepts of class, family and personal honor disappeared from the uncompromising present, as did the former elastic aristocratic principles (206, 292; 228, 324). Via his Doppelgänger Doctor Skovronnek—the only important character who survives the catastrophe (like Roth himself) and whose “fondness of people matched his low opinion of them” (comparable to Roth’s ambiguous stance towards his characters, 258; 286)—he states that in the present compartmentalized world nobody can take responsibility for others anymore. The Emperor cannot be responsible for his subjects, parents for their children, husbands for their wives, nor men for women. The social cohesion is forever lost and every individual and group must follow his, her or its own way at his, her or its own risk (258, 268; 285, 297). This neatly corresponds with Count Chojnicki’s statement that, in today’s world, a trust in God has given place to a trust in the nation-state (176; 196). Given that Chojnicki and Skovronnek strike the attentive reader as the author’s two Doppelgängers that contest and complement one another, this correspondence is hardly accidental. However, although Chojnicki spits on the forthcoming petty nations23 and Skovronnek is somewhat skeptical concern-

23  According to Chojnicki, Austrians are “waltz dancers,” Hungarians “stink,” Czechs are “born to clean boots,” Ruthenians are “treacherously disguised Russians,” Croats “broommakers”, Slovenians “chestnut-roasters”, and Poles “fornicators and barbers” (148; 164).

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ing emancipated wives and women,24 this does not mean that they yearn for the old world. On the contrary, in the same way as Chojnicki dismantles the illusion of the Empire’s political cohesion, Skovronnek clearly sees that its social cohesion is fake and the emancipation of its constituents is necessary. Yet inasmuch as full emancipation of nations or women or children merely substitutes one solitude for another, in the opinion of these Zeitdiagnostiker, they cannot welcome it enthusiastically, and neither can Roth. The self is an equally elusive shelter of one’s identity, as is the other. Equipped with the bitter postwar experience—many liberation movements resulted in reactionary nationstates—Roth’s narrator realizes that anchoring identity in one’s self instead of the other merely reestablishes solitude, which proves to be non-locatable. Therefore, rather than being an uncritical adherent of monarchist ideology, the narrator of The Radetzky March oscillates like the frontier men among the novel’s protagonists. However, in his particular case, being located at the historical frontier means being dislocated from both the epoch before and the epoch after the First World War. Like Brecht’s interpreter of the stage happenings, Roth’s narrator belongs neither to the darkness beyond the stage nor under the lights of the stage itself. As for the latter world of today, the narrator of The Radetzky March keeps distance to the petty nation-states in which the outcome of the First World War has pushed him. As for the former world of yesterday, the supranational Empire from before the War is definitely over, which gives him the opportunity to reconstruct the trajectory of its catastrophe, as he trusts, sine ira et studio. As seen in this supposedly impartial perspective, the trigger for the Empire’s breakdown was the dislocation of its center that, withdrawn into solitude, unavoidably generated further dislocations instead of the desired cohesion. Unexpectedly though, one of the effects of this fateful concatenation of dislocations turns out to be the narrator’s own dislocation from the world of his protagonists. If they are forever gone, then his dislocation is enforced, which means that the narrator is affected by the same developments as they are. He is an involved transmitter rather than a distant master of this concatenation. As if suppressing this undesired involvement and taking advantage of his distance instead, Roth’s narrator locates his protagonists in their predetermined fate, which they supposedly cannot comprehend. At one place in the novel for example, he states that Lieutenant Trotta was unable to express the reason for his depression but that “we” (i.e. he and his reader) can disclose it on his behalf (122; 138). 24  According to Skovronnek, “there was nothing in the world that did not trouble them” (258; 285).

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However, precisely by using his temporal dislocation to locate his protagonists in their own time, to rivet them to their fate, he unwittingly redoubles their pattern of keeping the others at a distance. All Trottas mercilessly apply it to their fellow beings and especially provincial subordinates, multiplying in such a way their own solitude. In doing so, they blindly follow their Emperor whose unbeatable detachment forced all his subjects into repeating it. Yet if this universal pattern ultimately catches up even with Roth’s narrator, then he is its carrier rather than a critical observer, an exemplary representative of the literary world that he is at pains to antiquate from his quasi-outside life position. This is how the second and hidden narrator’s frontier position, next to the highlighted temporal one, comes to the fore: that between the protagonists’ literary space and the author’s life space. Despite his consistent striving to exempt himself from his protagonists’ destiny to reach his author’s supposedly sovereign freedom, the narrator’s dislocation turns out to be no less located and his solitude no less enforced than that of the protagonists. As Roth’s narrator compulsively repeats the politics of an empire that it claims to have placed in a museum, the question that must be raised reads: who locates whose solitude, the narrator that of the protagonists as we have had the impression hitherto, or the other way around as we are now about to realize? As no final disentanglement of their intertwined relationship is possible, the protagonists’ and the narrator’s solitudes turn out to be deprived of their clear location, which makes them interact with those of their readers that are seemingly placed beyond the aesthetic area. The spaces of literature and life thus penetrate into one another, inducing the mutual dislocation of their identities. Therefore, in The Radetzky March, against the intention of its author, not merely does the disaggregation of the Habsburg Empire take place but also the disaggregation of literature’s empire. Inasmuch as this empire is established by a frontier man as a typical go-between, it loses its traditional sovereignty and self-sufficiency. Although in reintroducing the epic narrative into his novel Roth did his best to procure a protected autonomous location for literature’s solitude, this solitude breaks free from its envisaged autonomy into an unforeseeable dissemination.

Radomir Konstantinović’s Descartes’ Death

Yugoslavia’s breakup took place in the heated atmosphere of enflamed narratives of dispossession. Local historiographies and the media were at pains to present their ethnic constituencies as victims of the other Yugoslav constituencies, or even of these constituencies’ mutual conspiracy. This victimhood

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proved to be a powerful instrument for the consolidation of self-empowerment as well as for the concomitant reshaping and recalibration of one’s polis. Narratives of victimhood as instruments of national unification compensated for the historical injustices that, on the one hand, had supposedly been suffered but, on the other, they unfortunately induced new, contemporary injustices. Many peoples’ individual existence was, through no fault on their part, exposed to a collective anger that was firmly determined to settle alleged historical debts. The traumatic condition of these peoples’ sudden and irresistible dispossession gave way to a number of literary works among which can be numbered Radomir Konstantinović’s novel Descartes’ Death (1996). At the time that it was initially published, the Serbian writer was widely regarded, on the basis of his three novels from the 1950s and two works of a generically hybrid character from the 1960s, as an adherent of the avant-garde.25 I find this more or less entrenched opinion inappropriate because Konstantinović entered a stage of Serbian literature when the avant-garde abolishment of the literary institution had already been dismantled and shown to be an illusion. The scandal that the avant-garde wanted to provoke ended in the literary museum as an art commodity, as Konstantinović remarks in The Pentagram (Pentagram 298), eight years before Peter Bürger gave this thesis an elaborate form in his Theory of the Avant-Garde. It therefore seems more appropriate to interpret Konstantinović as this movement’s critical inheritor who does not credit the avant-garde blindly but nevertheless refuses to renounce it completely. Modifying avant-garde poetics, he transforms its favoring of the ‘true’ reality over the ‘cheating’ fiction into a mutual subversion of these two registers. This is how Konstantinović becomes a sort of ‘Blanchot’ of Serbian literature who systematically interrogates the frontiers of the literary institution. Consistently following this orientation, in Descartes’ Death, for example, he mixes the French classicist philosophical tradition represented by Descartes and Pascal with the English modernist literary tradition represented by Pound and Beckett. This indicates that he considers the avant-garde attempt to erase literary artificiality as overcome. Such revolutions only spawn heaps of garbage and cemeteries. “I am visiting cemeteries with increasing frequency”, reads The Pentagram (280). “Who will stop the progress of these cemeteries 25  For this representative opinion, see Deretić’s canonic history of Serbian literature (Deretić 633). Even Bora Ćosić in his undoubtedly most lucid reading of Konstantinović’s oeuvre by now, insists on the surrealist and futurist character of the writers’ first postwar novels (which force their sense to emerge from the nonsense). (Ćosić, Vražji nakot 58–78) Even though he is right that in these works the references to real circumstances are carefully dosed or covered, I find them more important and subversive than he is ready to accept.

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and heaps of garbage?” (280) Instead of envisioning such a definite translation of fiction into reality, Konstantinović establishes their disjunctive conjunction. He considers that these registers are not assimilable into one another but that they are necessarily related.26 To foreground this, he introduces a documentary endnote into his fictions, an epitome of Derrida’s later discovery of the supplement,27 locating it at the text’s lowest margin, i.e. in the competence zone of the so-called implied author. This is an important innovation in comparison, say, with Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground (1864) or Rilke’s The Notes of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910) in which documentary endnotes still belong among the narrator’s responsibilities. In the tradition of the South Slav novels, such as Janko Polić Kamov’s The Drained Swamp (1952) or Meša Selimović’s The Dervish and the Death (1966), the endnotes are even attributed to one of the figures, in the first case the narrator-protagonist Arsen Toplak and in the second the narrator-protagonist’s best friend Hassan.28 Konstantinović removes them from the fictional domain into the factual in order to emphasize these two domains’ disjunctive temporalities. In fact, from the very beginning, all his works parenthesize the place and year of their emergence—Give Us Today ends with the note “(Belgrade, 1952)”, The Mousetrap with “(In Belgrade, 1955)”, The Clean Ones and the Dirty Ones with “(In Belgrade, 1957)”, Ahasuerus or the Treatise on the Beer Bottle with “(Belgrade, 1964)”, and The Pentagram with “(Belgrade, 1963–65)”—which underlines the border between fiction and reality.29 Descartes’ Death almost unnoticeably modifies this 26  Ćosić is therefore right when he remarks that Konstantinović continuously oscillates between the surrealist poetics of nonsense and the awareness that, in a last analysis, senselessness and chance cannot escape sense and order. (Vražji nakot 54–57) In my reading, his poetics of disjunctive conjunction instigates an endless mutual outsmarting between them. In connection with such systematic meandering, it is worth noting that he was born in Subotica, the center of the Serbian Northern borderland (like Danilo Kiš thereafter). Borderlands are by definition zones of ‘inimical proximity.’ (Bartov and Weitz 1). 27  Derrida introduces this concept in his Of Grammatology (or. 1968) by defining it, deliberately ambiguously, as simultaneously “the fullest measure of presence” and “the mark of an absence” (Of Grammatology 144), i.e. as accretion and substitution (200). Because supplementarity can always be interpreted in these two ways, it is “a necessarily indefinite process” (281). The same characteristics hold for Konstantinović’s poetics of disjunctive conjunction, as we will come to see in the following. 28  In the first case the last novel’s sentence, before Arsen Toplak’s signature, is “For I—am not I!”; in the second, the novel closes with the following words: “Written with the hand of Hassan, Ali’s son: I did not know he was so unhappy. Peace to his tormented soul! 1962–1966.” “He” refers to the novel’s narrator-protagonist Ahmed Nurudin. 29  The endnote of Ivo Andrić’s Bosnian Chronicle (or. 1945), for example, reads “In Belgrade, in April 1942”. This endnote, although seemingly completely unrelated to the represented

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clear distinction between two registers. It eliminates parentheses, rendering the year of its emergence discursively rather than numerically: “In Belgrade, in Ninety-three” (U Beogradu, Devedeset treće). Instead of sounding neutral, this endnote leaves the impression of being filtered through a personal perspective, which gives the novel’s factual frame a fictional dimension. Suddenly, the situation of narration knocks on the door of the narrated situation, operating as an intruder whose intervention does not melt these situations into one another but enables their mutual interrogation. In such a way, fiction and reality clandestinely dislocate each other. I interpret their disjunctive conjunction as a distinctively post-avant-garde operation. In the continuation of his idea of supplementation, Derrida applied the terms grafting (Dissemination) and framing (The Truth in Painting) to highlight the paradoxical character of this operation. In the twentieth century’s second, post-Holocaust half, fiction and reality became fatefully coupled with one another, without each for its part losing its distinction. Epitomizing the realm of the dead and the living, they could no longer avoid responsibility for each other. In accordance with that, Konstantinović’s Croatian contemporary Ranko Marinković, for example, had already let them irrevocably embrace one another in his 1953 novella “The Embrace”. At its conclusion, the figure of a gendarme captures the narrator from behind into his ‘iron embrace’, punishing this ‘Klugscheiser’ with such ‘eternal captivity’ for the irony at his (i.e. gendarme’s) expense. In his peculiar tractate Ahasuerus (1964), however, Konstantinović goes even further. This post-apocalyptic monologue that strategically displaces the scene of its action from the gloomy present into the medieval past emerges, as indicated by its endnote “(Belgrade, 1964)”, into a significant historical moment situated after the Eichmann trial (1961). Its writing takes place in a hotel room, as does that of the simultaneously composed Pentagram, the closing paragraphs of which, significantly, also circle around Ahasuerus’ enforced nomadism. The historical “repetition of the same evil” connects the two time plans, enabling “the discovery of Eichmann in Caligula” (Pentagram 446). In the early 1960s, postcolonial Europe faces the Holocaust’s anxious legacy, entering a long process of expiation that will gain its real momentum in the 1968 movements. As Aimé Césaire explained in his Discourse on Colonialism (1950), action that is placed at the outset of the 19th century nevertheless, being bereft of parentheses, opens a transfer between these two times. Zoran Milutinović explains: “The novel was written in Belgrade under German occupation, during the famine-stricken and coldest winter of the Second World War. And once again the thunder of cannons from Europe, and news of Ustasha massacres in neighboring Bosnia, at that time the Nazi puppet-state in Croatia, could have been heard in Belgrade” (232).

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the denial of the extra-European colonial crimes paved the way for their shocking return in a more perfidious and sophisticated inner-European form. Each polite Christian citizen unleashed the demon that s/he had carried at the heart of his or her humanism all of the time without any awareness of it (Césaire 36). As Césaire’s inspirer Walter Benjamin put in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1940),30 this powerful return of the repressed amidst European civilization irrevocably compromised the firmly entrenched European trust in linear historical time that brings salvation. Konstantinović is the writer of this powerfully shattered world, the alleged humanism of which suddenly became dispossessed of its hitherto self-evident divine protection. Around the hotel room in The Pentagram, “the Walpurgis night begins to flare up”, “planted” with the “backs of the dead” (197). This Mefistofelian “world of a will oriented toward denial”, a “will for crime” in the name of one’s “ideal, metaphysical reality”, such a world of a “burnt, already carbonized and yet eerily persistent humanism” (197–198), cannot be stopped by the pentagram on the threshold of Faustus’ room or the five-pointed star on his doppelganger’s forehead (200). This explains the evocation of the Faustian project of a “dehumanization of the world”, i.e. “freeing the world from the violence of a consciousness that humanizes it” (261). “After all that this consciousness has spawned, after a history that erupted with campfires in this very night, the campfires on the way of the required absolute, in the stench of burnt human flesh in the name of such an absolute”, (263) Ahasuerus and The Pentagram— two works that were written simultaneously like Conrad’s Lord Jim and The Heart of Darkness—present themselves, retroactively, as bitter interrogations of the modern European conscience. Significantly, this conscience is called to responsibility from the European periphery whose “prolonged medieval night” testifies that the global ambition of the modernist “universal rationalization” has failed.31 It spawned “pyres, gallows for enemies and perjurers” along with a bloody “river filled with the dead bodies”. “Does this river follow me? I hear it sometimes quite well” (264). This guilty conscience ceaselessly circulates in Konstantinović’s narratives, convoluting their linear historical time. Konstantinović shares Derrida’s postHolocaust feeling that, in a spectral repetition of Shakespeare’s age, “time is 30  Rothberg (Multidirectional 80) cautioned that Césaire took his main concept choc en retour from the French translation of Benjamin’s essay (1947). 31  In this regard as in many others, Konstantinović anticipated the sociological and ethnological interrogation of modernity that will be launched a quarter of century later, for example in Zygmunt Bauman’s Modernity and the Holocaust (1989) and Arjun Appadurai’s Modernity at Large (1996).

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out of joint”; forever losing its former homogeneity, it has become dis-jointed, disharmonic and discorded (Derrida, Specters 25). As Blanchot (Après coup 99) once memorably put it—after Auschwitz—any narrative, whenever it might have been written, will in the time to come be a narrative before Auschwitz. The past is no longer a logical presupposition but a retroactive forgery of the present, the present no longer a logical corollary but a retroactive forgery of the past. In the posttraumatic world, temporal dimensions do not endorse but rather betray each other. A persistent sideshadowing interrupts the apparent continuity of the past’s foreshadowing and the present’s backshadowing, opening up amidst both of them a spectral space of contingency. Konstantinović’s narratives operate in this dangerously spreading potential space as testified by their continuously growing errancies and aberrancies, i.e. inserted free associations, questions, parenthetical remarks and footnotes.32 Two temporalities, the public (communal) and the private (solitary), enter in them the relationship of disjunctive conjunction, tirelessly dislocating each other. This haunting spectrality of the post-Holocaust world dispossessed of the divine paternal protection cannot but leave a powerful imprint on the shaping of its individual identities as well. The contingent world of possibilities overshadows the established world of reality. The beginning of The Pentagram reads: “Am I myself or that man’s self? Where are the borders between these two possible selves? They are lost, dissolved in this absolutely equal possibility of both selves …” (168) And the end reads: “For when I rise, who will rise? An unnamed monster, without a face, on the way to no return, or someone’s forgotten brother on the way to his lost brothers …” (455) The “tyranny over history” erases “the last differences” between “me and the others” (434). “The man who still lies under me, in the deaf river willows, am I accidentally not him, with his back over the water, with the back of his head crowned with grass, sludge, with his face in the mud, with his knees under his chin […] are he and I something the same, so that there is no longer any difference between us?” (435–436) If in suffering under tyranny (as a tyranny over the time) a sense of brotherhood emerges, of a terrible kinship via suffering, then side by side and at the same time with this feeling of connectedness produced by tyranny 32  The extraordinarily extended footnotes make the powerful ‘other scene’ of what is probably Konstantinović’s most famous work, The Philosophy of the Province (Filosofija palanke, 1969). In this work the alternative scene of his argumentation occupies almost the same space as the main text but typically develops in a kind of extra-temporality that is bereft of linear direction.

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a devastating sense of identity arises, of an identical fate in this worldnot-world in which “all stories are same”, a world without me because it is without you. The tyranny is an attack on history by the very fact that it is attack on my individuality. (436–437) Returning now to the seemingly insignificant endnote of Descartes’ Death, “In Belgrade, in Ninety-three”, it is worth noting that these reflections from The Pentagram surreptitiously resonate behind it. That year, in which the novel was written, was an extraordinary year in recent Serbian and Belgrade history. In a lecture delivered in Sarajevo in 1997 Konstantinović designates it as a “time when you here in Sarajevo, under one of the most horrible, most disgraceful sieges of this epoch, offered resistance to the agony of humanity (while we could not help you, although I ask myself increasingly frequently: could we not or were we not allowed to?)”.33 Within the novel, the hero’s mother describes the same year as follows: “So it is, now we have neither a state nor pride, nor coffee, nor toilet paper anymore” (Dekartova smrt 110) and the sixty-five yearold hero, for his part, states: “My greatest sorrow tonight is going to the market […] there is no market for me anymore […] so I even cry for the market in my sleep …” (200). He laments: As if I am ashamed of the market (wherefrom this shame of the market?), but if when someone needs you it means that you are usable, then all this now is my sorrow for the market as the sorrow of all my sorrows: what do they buy there now without me? What do they sell (without me)? (200) Elsewhere he remarks “Everything is empty, numb and dark …” (217) Due to the international isolation as well as economic and political sanctions, Belgrade in ninety-three was an isolated and imprisoned city without any connection to the international market of goods. Not only was it impossible to exit the deaf city darkness but it even became dangerous to approach one’s own window: “I cannot even approach the window, this is a night of grave excavations, I am at the cemetery, which is being excavated …” (200) This is the Belgrade of ninety-three: a city densely overcast, oppressive, and hit by inflation of all values. Konstantinović’s novel comes into being amidst a war storm that, expanding from a seemingly insignificant endnote, retroactively contaminates all the spaces of the represented world. But this storm is 33  The lecture was delivered at the Fourth Assembly of the Citizens of Serbian Nationality in Bosnia and Herzegovina on 22. June 1997. See http://pescanik.net/2011/11/zivotinja-moje -ljudskosti/. Access 27 April 2017.

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simultaneously a persistent motive of the represented world, which opens the possibility that it has spread out in a linear-causal fashion, i.e. from this world into the situation of writing. The family father for example—the strict rational ‘Descartes’ whose 1982 death titles the novel—repeatedly warns his family members of the coming storm. The signal that the storm is approaching was Tito’s 1980 death and its third omen the father’s death that struck the open wound inflicted by the disappearance of the Great Father.34 But the real tempest breaks ten years later with the Yugoslav wars that force their survivors, haunted by remorse and guilty conscience, to gather the scattered remnants of their lost paternal protectors. One among them is Radomir Konstantinović who works on his novel from 1993 to 1995 amidst one of the numerous heaps of war ruins. In such a post-traumatic situation immediately after the war’s explosion, not a single familiar human face remained unaltered, all of them underwent disfigurement, dismemberment or complete erasure. Could the disaster have been prevented if the family members had recognized the omens of its arrival or did the family members only recognize these events as such omens after the disaster had taken place? The disjunctive conjunction of the represented situation and the situation of representation systematically prevents the smooth resolution of this dilemma. In Konstantinović’s post-avant-garde poetics, their bifurcating temporalities refuse assimilation into a unifying history. In fact, right at the beginning of the novel, we read: “My father? Now just this watch […] this fountain pen […] a small selection of Descartes, or Montaigne, in three volumes” (5). Slightly further on a Montaigne-quote: “We are made of fragments that are connected with one another in so shapeless and diverse a fashion that every fragment in every moment plays at its own expense” (7). From these fragments it is impossible to create a harmonious picture because the winds of chance, in one of their unexpected gusts, irrevocably blew up the idea of the whole (24–25). Dismayed by this whimsical wind, the narrator of this novel, the father’s son, presents himself as a persistently distracted gatherer of fragments bereft of a unifying vision. His post-traumatic condition 34  Konstantinović was Tito’s adherent not only during Yugoslavia’s time but also thereafter, when he withdrew into a ‘(self-)dislocating solitude’. With regard to both this consistency and withdrawal, he in fact repeated his father’s behavior after the Second World War (see footnote 35). His father’s convulsive fear from the terrible chaos after the destruction of Yugoslavia’s multinational equilibrium, as depicted in this novel, probably rose from his failed attempt to establish such an equilibrium before the Second World War. For the writer’s loyalty to Tito’s Yugoslavia, see his posthumous hommage “Titova misao” (Tito’s Thought) that expectedly became ill-reputed among the Serbian mainstream intellectuals after Yugoslavia’s breakdown.

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is opposed to the father’s sharply focused attention that, “turned toward his interior” like an art form, “created his self” uninterruptedly (11). In fact, in this Cartesian manner—seen retroactively—the father was at constant pains to prevent the approaching storm and its concomitant chaos. From the perspective of the other family members, however, it was exactly by fiercely opposing the storm that he seems to have provoked it. The son significantly remarks: “From my father’s quiet well-balanced murmur a storm, an ocean, a natural force seemed to be breaking out” (15). Or in another place: It was raining, I remember, a strong wind was blowing—suddenly, the door opened, I saw the father. He stood in the doorway, without a word. I do not know how long it lasted. But I remember well my despair. I did not know where to hide Pascal […] Pascal, that’s me who does not love his father. Pascal, that’s me then that night: the rain was getting stronger, the rain with the wind … (136) Or consider the mother’s commentary of the father’s odd behavior: Do you still remember our trips? At a certain moment, regularly, the dark, terribly threatening clouds arrived, we did not expect this, or perhaps we expected yet did not want to expect this, we gathered the garbage under the ever darker skies […] we were looking for a recycle bin, we searched for it for a long time and, as we were leaving, he remained the last (and the skies above him terribly dark) in order to inspect and check everything […] but nothing, this rain did not fall (it now seems that it never fell), the light returned, and peace, nothing, everything is clean, and the serene skies, suddenly serenity, this rain never fell nor will it ever fall, in a word: I hate your father. (110–111) In a word, the family itself functions as a disjunctive conjunction of its members. On the one hand, “in Belgrade, in Ninety-three”, the sixty-five year-old son seems to be retroactively realizing that the father had been right. The storm of war ultimately welded heaven and earth together by turning everything that was between them into garbage. On the other hand, however, it was probably precisely the father who, with his extremely nervous anticipations and preventions, gave way to this tempest, so that the mother was right. Perhaps he should not have eliminated the garbage so meticulously from the family’s life? After all, it is humane to leave behind some scraps for oneself (213), even to urinate into the Trieste Canale (110), since garbage is a human life’s everyday companion. Whoever eliminates it so consistently, should not be astonished to one day

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be inundated by it. In sharp opposition to the father, the hero’s mother even enjoys exposing herself to the street market’s garbage: I am not afraid of death; I am afraid of an empty market. Do you remember, my child, the enormous piles of all sorts of things; do you remember the way I was, in the spring, at the time of abundance, the time of garbage, the first onion and garlic, and soft green salad, very tender, the garbage gushed onto us from all sides. (213) Consistently following its poetics of disjunctive conjunction, the novel leaves open who is ultimately right, the father or the mother. Was it not this pathologically sanitary family constellation, due to its authoritarian character, that was probably the true trigger for the ensuing trauma? For the tempest accompanied by the flood that befell the family ultimately also drew the mother’s corps into the sea levitating above the garbage heap that had always fascinated her. She floated on the sea with her face turned down, slowly moving through the water, a huge ancient immortal animal, God knows what is down there on the seabed, it looks as though she floats over the market […]. God knows what she can find among all the things in this garbage … (213–214) Whose pathological fascination with the garbage caused the storm’s onslaught that turned the whole family into a humiliating heap of ruins? The answer to this question is systematically prevented by the retroactive intrusion of the family’s scattered remnants from the situation of writing back into the represented family situation. This ongoing back-shadowing repeatedly confronts the reader with the scene of disaster, forcing him or her to gather and combine its disconcerting remnants. Therefore, just as Ottmar Ette remarks about another work, this novel “suggests a reading method that might be called interrelational reading and obliges readers to constantly jump back and forth […] between its various parts” (Ette, Literatur in Bewegung 363). It cannot be read in a linear-progressive fashion but only deciphered through discontinuous associations, which significantly increase the reader’s responsibility for the conclusions that s/he makes. Due to his/her involvement, they are deprived of Kantian disinterestedness. Browsing the heap of the past’s exploded remnants proves to be a tricky undertaking in which the present and the past inextricably contaminate each other. The same disjunctive conjunction pertains to the narrator’s or son’s developing relationship with the hero or father. At the beginning, they are extreme

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opposites: Descartes and Pascal. As time goes by, the novel repeatedly evokes the situation of an old-aged writer who is corporeally ever closer to his father whom he is at pains to aesthetically shape. His physical and mental capacities decrease. The father’s last days lie already eleven years behind. At that time, the once very proud and righteous father had become visibly powerless, almost ‘animal’ in his behavior. But precisely this physical ‘animalization’ made his attitude towards his son humane, whereas the earlier period of his ‘humanity’ retrospectively appears to have been truly ‘bestial’. Next to the situation of the novel writing in “Belgrade, in Ninety-three” and the addressed situation of the father dying, the narrative’s third temporal level refers to the son’s teenager years that develop in a continuous quarrel with the rigid, Moses-like father. If we interpret these three temporal levels—the childhood (11–13 years),35 the time of the father dying (54 years), and the situation of writing (65 years)—as the three stages of the writer’s formation, Descartes’ Death suddenly reveals itself as a Künstlerroman. However, the aforementioned poetics of disjunctive conjunction makes these stages of the writer’s maturing melt into one another. In the form they are presented, it is unclear which one precedes and which follows on from the trauma of the father’s departure. At the beginning of chapter 35  At the age of thirteen, Radomir Konstantinović was temporarily abandoned by his father who was, as the minister of justice in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia’s government, forced to exile by the German occupation from 1941–1945. But as he refused to join the Yugoslav exile government, he did not hesitate to return into the socialist country to take the professor position at the Faculty of Law. Having been the chief architect of the 1939 agreement between the Serbian political leader Dragiša Cvetković and the Croatian political leader Vladko Maček to form a Serbo-Croatian coalition government, he consented with Tito’s attempt to restore this fragile equilibrium, which was heavily ruined by the war. But as Bora Ćosić clarifies in his insider reconstruction, he was entirely disillusioned as regards the implementation of this equilibrium at the state level, since the circumstances were chaotic and conflict-ridden, the equality of nations underrepresented and the representatives of the victorious army very nervous toward the individuals “whose cleverness was beyond their reach.” (Vražji nakot 13) With his first-hand experience of the Yugoslav politicians’ rudeness and hypocrisy, he kept strictly aloof from politics in the continuation of his academic and legislative career, and concentrated exclusively on the family and private law. (10–15) His sore consciousness of having been able to establish a juridical equality between the Yugoslav peoples but having been nonetheless prevented to do so by petty daily politicians, might have been the source of Professor Konstantinović’s lifelong self-enclosure and rigidity. Being in a sense without parents (his parents were poor and simple people from Serbian province), himself his own father as it were—“the Father God cannot have his own father”—he silently “created a state of his own mind, his own republic of stability, endurance and ideal justice” (96), obviously miles away from the existing one(s).

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four the narrator calls himself, accordingly, “a sexagenarian at thirteen, puer aeternus” (Dekartova smrt 15) and in chapter twenty “a child-old man”, “a monster old man-child” (97–98) who does not even know whether his weeping is childish or senile. Youth and old age interlock so strongly in him from the outset that you cannot really be sure whether the teenager—when he was anxious that the pauses in his father’s university lecture or domestic scansion of Latin verses will swell and explode—already anticipated the father’s later ‘animal’ weeping, groaning, wining, murmuring and wheezing, or whether the elderly narrator projects his terrible experience of the father’s death agony (or the fear of his own upcoming death agony) back onto his own childish fears. The breaks in the speech and flows of thought, which his father was still able to keep under control, proliferate in the son’s narrative to the degree that the teenager’s fear that they will completely swallow his father’s speech and thought consistency leaves the impression of the narrator’s anxiety that his own narrative will fail to be brought to a successful closure. Teeming with ‘aberrations’ such as associations and extended digressions, inserted questions and parenthesized remarks, Descartes’ Death represents the culmination of Konstantinović’s consistent post-avant-garde poetics of introducing foreign bodies into the body of the text and forcing these two bodies to exchange their substances. It continuously discursively ‘estranges’ its narrative kernel by switching from the fictional mode of indirect communication to the discursive mode of addressing the readers directly—in the form of, say, “well, that’s it” or “children”—that suddenly abolishes their ‘splendid isolation’ from the represented action. The narrator’s numerous self-referential notes interrupt his hetero-referential narrative flow to the verge of disaggregating it into a loose cluster of random ‘diary’ remarks. It becomes, as it were, a “meaningless bunch of former things […] freed from all the former intent that shaped them, from any form” (Pentagram 281). This is how Konstantinović’s deep concern with the terror of the non-represented disrupts the comfortable illusion of the represented world, or how in his prose the sublime consistently destroys the beautiful. He asks art to face the twentieth century’s “world of hell, the world for which the medieval visions of hell are nothing but childish jokes” (300).36 For if the Greek art of “universal beauty” hides the truth that “Greece was a 36  In the same way that Konstantinović’s remark about the avant-garde art from The Pentagram undergoes an extensive elaboration eight years later in Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-garde, and his critique of modernity twenty-five years later in Bauman’s Modernity and the Holocaust, this sinister ‘diagnosis’ of the twentieth century is attentively elaborated twelve years later in Eric Hobsbawm’s The Age of Extremes: A History of the World 1914–1991.

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disharmonious world of terror and shame”, then today’s art is “covered by the ashes of six million burnt Jews, my brothers” (300–301). The poetics of disjunctive conjunction that, in such a way, determine, firstly, the relationship between the fictional kernel and the discursive frame, secondly, the relationships between the three family members and, thirdly, the narrator’s (son’s) relationship to the hero (the father), also leave their indelible imprint on the novels’ internal structure. Their diegetic levels systematically disrupt each other. The father, the mother and the son are placed at the novel’s primary, foundational level whereas its secondary, derived level is inhabited by the great thinkers’ and poets’ quoted sentences, mostly those of Descartes, Pascal, Montaigne, Pound, and Rilke. The figures from the first level are connected with these from the second level through a network of imaginary relationships. Finally, these thinkers’ and poets’ literary and non-literary figures occupy the third diegetic level. The intellectual heritage of the introduced thinkers, poets and their figures enjoys a similar ex-temporality with regard to the actions of the novel’s figures as does the situation of writing. However, as opposed to the fictional father, mother and son, the agency of writing is allocated to the real and unrepeatable historical time, whereas the figures of famous thinkers and poets inhabit an ‘eternal’ medium, which Bakhtin once designated as the “great time” (Bakhtin, “Towards a Methodology” 170). The novel thus conjoins three disjointed temporalities. However, if the first ex-temporality (the time of writing) introduces disaster into the world of the family members, then the second ex-temporality (of the thinkers and poets) introduces into it eternity, giving the figures an opportunity to exempt themselves from the catastrophe that befalls them. In the great intellectual space opened by the imaginary dialogue between Montaigne, Descartes, Pascal, Pound and Rilke, as well as of the father and son with them, the small devastated Belgrade family returns, to render it in the words of The Pentagram: to its global family, its kind; it gets in touch, via the closest of its causes, with the remote things and events with which it […] seemingly had nothing to do; it returns to the world as a kind of boundless brotherhood that covers everything up to infinity […] It becomes a miracle through this transformation from death to life, from the loneliness of the fact to the element of a universal brotherhood of an order, from a stalemate of a fait accompli […] in which nothingness prevails […] to the active state of factors … (340–41) Here, the quotes which Konstantinović extracted from his decade-long extensive readings, paradoxically, play the role that Homi Bhabha attributed to

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fiction under traumatic circumstances: “Against the hard face of facts and the burden of experience, the fictional ‘as if’ opens up the counterfactual ethical narrative of the ‘what if’.” (Bhabha, “Afterword” 197) We meet an example of this ethical force of ‘imaginary reality’ in the novella “The Angel” (1953) by the aforementioned Croatian modernist writer Ranko Marinković, in which the terminally ill stonecutter Albert Knez imagines how upcoming generations will admire his artwork: “It seemed to him that from the vast distances of an immense eternity the certificate and recognition reached him in this godforsaken and crumpled corner of a provisional and ugly reality. He felt the breath of immortality” (Marinković 213). Considering the time and space of the novella’s emergence (i.e. an isolated island in the Yugoslav monarchy of the 1930s), one might interpret Albert Knez as Marinković’s Doppelgänger. In writing his novella, Marinković probably also hoped to rescue himself from the ugly provincial reality of interwar Yugoslavia. Konstantinović, who wrote after the postwar, socialist Yugoslavia’s disaster, took recourse in Montaigne, Descartes, Pascal, Pound and Rilke to rescue the memory of his small private family within the great ‘Yugoslav family’—that is to say, the memory of both families— from the suddenly provincialized cultural milieu of the Serbian nation-state that came into being after the Yugoslav wars. At the time of publication of Descartes’ Death, Konstantinović’s great confrontation with Serbian provincial nationalism, The Philosophy of the Province (1969), lay more than twenty five years in the past. Unfortunately, the fears articulated in this work had, in the meantime, materialized. Unlike the violently restricted national community that ensued from the war, the Yugoslav and his personal family’s communities appeared to Konstantinović as having been truly international and inclusive in their intellectual scope.37 Hence in Descartes’ Death, the introduction of the eternal “absolute reality” (Pentagram 167)—as the philosophers’ and writers’ only residence—into the private family members’ historically and spatially restricted reality does not really save these members from the Yugoslav paternal protection as it redeems them from its stormy devastation. The great and open Yugoslav family is now, along with Konstantinović’s small and rigid family, irretrievably lost but both families’ intellectual freedom and inclusiveness must not fall into oblivion. The 37  It deserves attention that, only four years after Descartes’ Death, Konstantinović decided to publish his year-long correspondence with Samuel Beckett in a book titled The Friend Beckett (Beket prijatelj, 2000). His first wife Katja was an inventive translator of Beckett’s Molloy into Serbian. However, by claiming that concordances are deeper, Ćosić draws an analogy between Konstantinović’s Give Us Today (Daj nam danas, 1952), written much before this correspondence, and Beckett’s prose. (Vražji nakot 70).

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retroactive task of their careful recollection is, among other things, to transcend the lack of personal freedom in Konstantinović’s family. Already The Pentagram heralded the state’s forthcoming collapse as something “inevitable” but at the same time as events that “destroy the memory” (167). In Ahasuerus and The Pentagram, their victims, the displaced persons, end up in a hotel room— “I do not know where I am, I cannot remember the name of this hotel, the room number, the name of the city” (167). The catastrophe’s survivors become exiles bereft of belonging. The existential anchorage of their world disappears. But is it not precisely this suddenly enforced “nowhere” of their existence that enables these people to become “limitlessly greater, older, deeper, and more comprehensive” (168) than they were before? Is not the disjunction at one, lower level a necessary prerequisite for the conjunction at another, higher level? If the protagonist-narrator-author’s break with his own father—Pascal’s bidding farewell to Descartes—enabled him to replace the father’s rigid surveillance with Tito’s generous care, does not the traumatic disappearance of the latter open up the way for a family at even looser ends, a timeless and placeless community that dispossesses its members of all identifiable qualities? In such a way, does dispossession not become a salvation? Being an exile: maybe does not at all mean being like me, the me that I knew (that me had believed to know), but being as a pure being, as its strength, its unnamable, inexplicable reason, beyond any form and boundary; as a duration that suddenly reveals itself to me; as an extension across my borders; as an absolute present beyond the time, at a place where infinity rises … (168) Therefore, to return to the poetics of disjunctive conjunction, disjunction from the fatherly care turns out to be spawning a new conjunction in which the ‘abandoned children’ enjoy a new freedom. The deeper the devastation, moreover, the broader the liberation. Whoever is forcefully disjoined from his or her own family members joins the once completely different and very remote persons and collectivities that are also dispossessed of their communities by, with them, spontaneously establishing a world-wide disseminated family dispossessed of all nationally, culturally or religiously particular qualities. Through such a clandestine ‘homecoming’ of their dislocated solitudes, which takes place beyond their intention, the dispossessed enter the “universal”, “boundless brotherhood” of a “global family” (340–41). Unaware, the sufferers all over the world forge a “terrible kinship” (436–37) that emerges in an “absolute present beyond the time, at a place where infinity arises” (168); they meet in a sort of post-history in which “forgotten meanings” celebrate their “homecoming

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festival” (Bakhtin, “Towards a Methodology” 170). In a word, a community based on “a pure being” and an “unnamable, inexplicable reason, beyond any form and boundary” (Konstantinović, Pentagram 168) is a community that turns its dispossession of any distinctive quality—its constitutive void—into its highest advantage. Unlike ‘geopolitical’ communities that bind their members by the discriminative identity bonds, this messianic community appears to be, in its open potentiality, limitlessly inclusive. Giorgio Agamben described it as a coming community that evacuates its distinctive ‘nature’ in order to determine its members without discrimination, i.e. without dividing the proper from the improper, the human from the inhuman. (The Coming Community 65) Inasmuch as it establishes a void in the place of its essence, it produces no human face at the expense of inhuman defacement (67–68). This final consequence of Konstantinović’s poetics of disjunctive conjunction—that they pave the way for the redemptive community yet-tocome—brings us back to the initial analogy with Maurice Blanchot whose post-avant-garde poetics rest on the closely affiliated concept of désœuvrement. In the early 1950s—the same post-apocalyptic time as Konstantinović— he developed this concept from Mallarmé’s literary “project of the Work, in its very realization always yet-to-come” (Blanchot, The Space 42). This à-venir— essential for Mallarmé’s defense of the endangered identity of literature conceived as a finished work—clearly connects désœuvrement with the emptiness of an unpredictable future. According to Blanchot, modern writing constitutes itself “as always going beyond what it seems to contain and affirming nothing but its own outside […] affirming itself in relation to its absence, the absence of (a) work, unworking” (trans. modified, l’absence d’œuvre ou le désœuvrement; Blanchot, L’Entretien infini 388) (Blanchot, The Infinite 259). In 1955, when Blanchot introduced the concept of désœuvrement, he seems to have borrowed it from Alexandre Kojève, who used it for the first time in 1952 to designate the idle man of posthistoire, the voyou désœuvré, i.e. the man in the eternal Sabbath (Kojève 396). However, refusing to share Kojève’s apocalyptic Hegelianism, which postpones the Sabbath to the end of history, Blanchot re-signifies désœuvrement in such a way as to establish its permanent effect within each given identity. By constitutively opening this identity’s interior to the redemptive exterior, he irrevocably disrupts and disquiets its being. In this manner he uncouples the Hegelian philosophically sovereign concept of Aufhebung from the final synthesis by translating it into the eternally transgressive realm of literature and thereby making its promise interminable, always-yet-to-come. As Agamben demonstrates in Time that Remains, both Aufhebung and désœuvrement belong to the messianic tradition introduced by St Paul’s katargeín, which refers to the suspension of work on the Sabbath.

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According to Paul’s paradoxical explanation, it is through such an evacuation of action that energy gains its potency (dýnamis) and completion (telos). The only way for the goal-oriented reality to resume the strength and completeness that have been lost through such an orientation is to make place for pondering potentiality. This is the meaning of the Lord’s response to Paul that “potency gets completed through weakness”. And this is what, in Blanchot’s as well as Konstantinović’s conception, literature is expected to achieve: to reveal how contingent and restricted the reality that is established by power comes to be. Following this thread, Blanchot’s literature systematically highlights its own powerlessness (impouvoir) or “contests itself as power” (Blanchot, Friendship 67); it is persistently oriented towards “what is outside […] of the book” (Blanchot, The Book to Come 225); its only work consists of the “elimination” and “destruction” of all that seems to be given (226); and its only “law” is “denial” (Blanchot, The Work of Fire 310). Its delineated self-negation defends the right of that which all statements recklessly exclude: “As soon as something is said, something else needs to be said. Then something different must again be said to resist the tendency of all that has just been said to become definitive […] There is no rest […]” (22). In both Blanchot’s and Konstantinović’s conception, literature’s relentless self-unworking places itself at the service of an inclusiveness to-come. By engaging this deactivating operation committed to an endless deferral, literature contests a “whole tradition wider than philosophy” that denies the emptiness genuine to language in filling it with a particular content (Foucault, Maurice Blanchot 13). It is an oppositional force firmly determined to disjoint and dislocate all that presents itself as being naturally conjoined and located. In his lucid reading of Blanchot’s “thought from outside”, Foucault pointed to its post-traumatic character. As a typical thinker of the post-apocalypse, haunted by its persistent repentance, Blanchot was desperately attracted by “an absence that pulls as far away from itself as possible [… and that] has nothing to offer but the infinite void” (28).38 This attraction to the disregarded inar38  Blanchot adheres to désœuvrement not just out of the intellectual experience of the “theoretical collaborator” (of structuralism), but also from the empirical experience of the practical collaborator of an anti-Semitic regime (he worked throughout the 1930s as a journalist for various right-wing papers; Haase and Large 85–95). As convincingly argued by more recent readers of Blanchot’s legacy, such as Steven Ungar (1995) or Michael Rothberg (Traumatic Realism), his disconcerted and disconcerting thought exemplifies an irresolvable remorse, which surmounts all attempts to pin down the sacrificed Other (autre) in the empirical terms of “someone other” (autrui). His consistent reflection on the limits of any such representation draws its intensity from the resilience of this disregarded surplus that in his thought acquires traumatizing dimensions.

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ticulate ‘outside’ makes Blanchot negligent of the politically articulated order ‘inside’ the world. “To be susceptible to attraction a person must be negligent” (28). This negligence is nonetheless extremely dangerous because the inarticulate outside, through its endless withdrawal, gradually removes the attracted person from his or her political articulation (34), making his or her past, kin and whole life non-existent (28). Foucault describes this spectral outside as “a gaze condemned to death” (28), averting and returning “to the shadow the instant one looks at it” (41). As soon as its withdrawal from the field of vision occurs, however, its underground voice begins to become discernible (47). “Is not this voice—which ‘sings blankly’ and offers little to be heard—the voice of the Sirens, whose seductiveness resides in the void they open, in the fascinating immobility seizing all who listen?” (45) Alongside his friend Bataille, Blanchot was powerfully seduced by this lethal void, no matter the price of denial and solitude that he paid for this fascination. The same desperate fascination with the dispossessed of the divine protection—and on that basis dislocated into an extreme solitude and ultimate absence—also pertains, in the different circumstances of a remote European margin, to Konstantinović. Dispossessed of his father’s protection as a teenager in Belgrade, he was for the first time summoned into ‘elective affinity’ with the deprived when, at school one day in 1942, Nazi collaborators took away his Jewish classmates. After the Jews had been dispossessed of their divine protection overnight, how could the existing world maintain its validity? Instead, for the subjects haunted by this question—and there were many such subjects in the world of collapsed empires—this world’s solid appearance turned out, at a closer inspection, to be resting on unpredictable chance. “The world is all that is the case,” reads the famous first sentence of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (1921). The world’s law, that is to say, relies on a pure coincidence of powers located far beyond our reach.39 No wonder, contingency is the dominant worldview of post-imperial literary heroes as well. Robert Musil, for instance, describes in The Man without Qualities (first volume 1930) the mental condition of his hero as a “primal resistance of the heart” to the “hardened world” into which one was “involuntarily put” (Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften 130). “You cannot find anywhere a sufficient reason that everything came as it had come; it also could have turned out differently” (131). This mobilizes the hero’s “sense of potentiality” (Möglichkeitssinn) that ceaselessly explores numerous possibilities 39  Already in Ahasuerus, as Ćosić rightly notices, Konstantinović likens the world to the dump rather than perfection (in this regard taking the mother’s side in Descartes’ Death, avant la lettre as it were). Already this work, therefore, launches a confrontation with his father’s fiercely advocated vision of world’s perfection. (Ćosić, Vražji nakot 52–53).

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unimplemented by the given reality. It acts in the name of those who have been excluded and silenced by this reality.40 However, as soon as such resistance to the world’s given state is raised to the status of the transcendental principle of human community—as envisaged by the selected group of its ‘engineers’—it turns into an imperative demand imposed upon all the dispossessed, notwithstanding the huge discrepancies between their starting positions. What this group of ‘engineers’ neglects is that their own dispossession is not nearly as devastating as the dispossession of the victims they pretend to speak for. The insistence on the relentless unworking of all identifying qualities—the disjoining of all stabilizing social and emotional junctures—does not consider that, to be without qualities at the symbolic level is substantially different from being bereft of them at the political level: the first freely chosen de-identification implies an unlimited mobility while the second enforced condition condemns people to harsh immobility of, say, ‘boat people’ or ‘asylum seekers’. To render this in Elisabeth Povinelli’s terms: “As a result a gap seems to open between those who reflect on and evaluate ethical substance and those who are this ethical substance” (11). How ethical is it to demand intellectual mobility from those selves that are, forced as they are to the condition of ‘bare life’, extremely deprived of its basic prerequisites? Is their physical immobility not the disregarded corollary of the economic and intellectual mobility’s raising to the transcendental principle, is it not this principle’s neglected empirical prerogative and the silenced basis of its triumph? These and similar questions point to the limits of Blanchot’s and Konstantinović’s post-avant-garde poetics created by a group of intellectuals who were, for one or another personal reason, attached to the disregarded victims. They make up an utterly heterogeneous ‘association’. However, by unreservedly identifying themselves with those sentenced to ‘absence’, Blanchot and Konstantinović carefully suppress their particular motives for this passionate attachment.

40  Characterized by an enormous “sense of potentiality,” Konstantinović acted as these outsiders’ spokesperson. Portraying him as a player determined to return the lost potentiality to the world, Ćosić quotes from his Pentagram: “Am I not, indeed, playing against this eternity,… an eternity that uses finality … For no one thing is only that what it is, and no one spiritual condition is only that what it, at one moment, appears to be.” (Vražji nakot 51) He also draws a parallel with Musil. (83–84).

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The Resurgence of the Paternal Relationship

Both Roth’s The Radetzky March and Konstantinović’s Descartes’ Death respond to the dispossession of the paternal protection that was induced by private and political catastrophes (the breakups of the Dual Monarchy and Yugoslavia), a dispossession that turned their authors into victims. To those who were sacrificed by such a deep restructuring of the private and political families, the newly established reality turned its disturbingly contingent face. A return to the collapsed past was impossible, as was reconciliation with the new present. Roth comes to terms with this disconcerting state of affairs by completely separating his narrator from the protagonists who are growingly threatened by the feeling of contingency: while they inhabit an absent world caught in the process of dissolution, he, with his readers, occupies the present and an apparently safeguarded world. Following the logic inherent in this convulsive defense reaction, he behaves like a typical epic narrator who never addresses his protagonists, since they no longer belong to his world, but exclusively his contemporaries, the readers. Taking advantage of his historically later position, behind the back of the protagonists whom he permanently ironizes because of their shortsightedness and naivety with regard to that which comes upon them, he enters with his readers a kind of the initiated partnership of sovereign persons. However his behavior is all but sovereign as it unwittingly redoubles that of his main protagonists who also take the allegedly sovereign stance of ‘splendid isolation’ toward the ‘provincial’ characters that were growingly disturbed by the feeling of the Empire’s contingency. If Roth’s narrator is drawn into such ‘repetition compulsion’, how can his epic attitude to his protagonists be sovereign? Instead, he becomes an exemplary representative of the same literary world that he is at pains to lock up in an artistic museum from his quasi-outside life position. Roth’s therapeutic attempt to reserve law for art and arbitrariness for life fails. They intermingle by ruining his antimodernist endeavor to save the endangered autonomy of art. If Roth, as the victim of the ruling imperial agency’s dethronement, demonstrates a ‘revisionist’ attitude to the ‘eternal’ art threatened by dissolution into an arbitrary life—a typically ‘conservative’ attitude for a hurt father— then Konstantinović, as the victim of the collapsed post-imperial subordinate agency, blows in the sails of art’s dissolution, demonstrating in such a way a typically ‘progressive’ attitude of a damaged son. According to Diana Fuss’ pertinent remark, the Father’s “imperial subject builds an Empire of the Same, and installs at its center a tyrannical dictator, ‘His Majesty the Ego’ ” (Fuss 145) and this is exactly what Roth’s narrator does when he encapsulates his protagonists within their predetermined fate that he is at pains to keep under control.

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He forces these protagonists to obey his self-aggrandizing mirror image (characteristic of all trauma narratives) that confers upon them an all-embracing artistic unity. From the point of view of the son though—i.e. Konstantinović’s narrator-protagonist—instead of triumphantly mirroring himself in the father-protagonist, he ultimately cannot but mime him, i.e. long for a substitution that is from the very beginning constitutively impossible to accomplish. As Frantz Fanon spelled out in his reshaping of Hegel’s master-slave dialectics from the subordinate perspective, instead of a “jubilant” self-recognition this leads to pathogenic consequences, turning the failed self into an abject object of constant obsession, self-reproach and punishment. (Fanon, Black Skin 210ff). This is how Konstantinović’s post-avant-garde poetics of disjunctive conjunction comes into being: the sublime as a quality characteristic of life unstoppably penetrates into the beautiful as a quality characteristic of art, persistently frustrating its autonomy. We should be wary, however, not to identify all writers victimized by a ruling imperial agency’s dethronement with the triumphant position of the father and, likewise, all writers sacrificed by the collapse of post-imperial subordinate agencies with the remorseful position of the son. Roth was born into a provincial Ashkenazi family that heavily depended upon the Emperor’s protection as the collective portrayal of the Ukrainian Jews in the novel convincingly demonstrates. After the breakup of the Empire, he tried to find a refuge in the protected realm of art. The majority of Austrian urban writers, like the aforementioned Musil but also a series of the prominent Austrian-Jewish writers such as Broch or Schnitzler, were passionate promoters of art’s contingency instead of ferociously protecting its autonomy like Roth. Roth was therefore, in a sense, a ‘provincial’ who opposed the modernizing mainstream of the Austrian interwar novel. Konstantinović as a typically urban writer was, on the contrary, in the context of the Serbian postwar narrative prose dominated by the provincial counter-modernism, dislocated into the permanent margins. Therefore, neither the literature of the post-imperial successor states nor the literature of the new post-post-imperial nation-states constitute organically homogeneous bodies. The paternal relationship between them, caught in the paradoxical movement of self-affirmation through self-dispossession, reenters and antagonizes their very core.

Chapter 7

The Politics of Remembrance: Walter Benjamin’s Berlin Childhood Around 1900 and Miroslav Krleža’s A Childhood in Agram in 1902–1903 The journey on which I am about to venture is no more than a pleasure trip … Immanuel Kant, Conjectures on the Beginning of Human History

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Memory as Therapy

Polemicizing against Fichte’s and Schelling’s transcendental-philosophical concept of the self, Novalis once famously stated: “We should not take life to be a novel given to us, but one made by us” (Schriften 2 563).1 This typical early Romanticist dictum, which in its turn stimulated Friedrich Schlegel to regard biography as the work of life-art (Werk der Lebenskunstlehre; Kritische Schriften 125), can be linked to Novalis’s earlier observation according to which “[t]he beginning [of the self] emerges later than the self; this is why the self cannot have begun. We see therefrom that we are in the realm of art here…” (Schriften 1 253). Because the beginning of the self is necessarily constructed retroactively, i.e. artistically, the self is an artificial (künstlich) rather than natural phenomenon, a ‘work of art’. Instead of being a firm given, it is a construct that is on-the-move (253). The early German Romanticists entrusted the task of such an ongoing artistic construction of the self to their Bildung-project. In order to consolidate a German self that had been seriously shaken by the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation in 1806 and the concomitant triumph of French assimilatory cosmopolitanism, they relegated the Enlightenment idea of Bildung out of the collective public sphere of educating others and into the private individual domain of forming the self (Selbstbildung) (Biti, Tracing 61–65). Since the German self of the time was fragile and damaged, as opposed 1  Here and in the following all translations from German, French and Croatian are mine unless otherwise specified.

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to the triumphantly expanding French self, it was incapable of a sovereign act of self-assertion but was instead obliged to invent itself through an interminable operation of self-finding (83–85). This obligation induced a persistent reconfiguration of the self’s past to make it suit his, her or its (i.e. a collective’s) metamorphosing present. What early German Romanticists envisioned was obviously an extremely demanding project. Nobody would feel the need to incessantly search for his or her foreclosed possibilities or to restore his or her neglected itineraries without having been previously hurt by an unexpected and violent severance from his or her familiar past (Hobsbawm, “Introduction” 2). “History is what hurts,” famously remarked Fredric Jameson (102), and one can only add to this: especially some of its participants. As regards early German Romanticists, their historical trauma was induced by the destruction of the Empire, the institution of new monarchies, and the ensuing feelings of a catastrophe, dizziness, and senselessness that befell certain collectivities and individuals more than the others (Fritzsche 29). According to Peter Fritzsche, these “stranded” agencies’ feelings of dispossession were the basic precondition for their project of reanimation, by way of commemoration, of that which history had mortified in their present (60). They understood their recollection as a counter-project to the victorious history that was written by their antagonists. The early German Romanticists’ ongoing commemoration of their selves’ past set the pattern for the coming generations of ‘stranded’ agencies. For example, writing in his doctoral thesis in the shadow of the First World War’s apocalypse (1917–1919), Walter Benjamin recalls Novalis’s artistically constructed self (Der Begriff 64). Benjamin finished his dissertation in the same year that gave birth to Freud’s famous essay on the uncanny (das Unheimliche, which etymologically also points to the feeling of unhomeliness). Following Friedrich Schelling, Freud defines the uncanny as a ghostly appearance that unexpectedly steps out from its apocryphal, hidden existence (“Das Unheimliche” 232). Although history envisioned oblivion for such “overcome ways of thinking,” their sudden resurfacing disconcerts the present reality in the form of an indeterminate “sense of déjà vu” (Empfindung des schon einmal Erlebthabens; Die Psychopathologie 295). Due to such a breakthrough of the unconscious into the conscious register, something that was hitherto considered to be evident acquires a spectral character, thereby inducing the uncanny feeling of reverberation. In his essay on Goethe’s Elective Affinities (1924–1925) and the simultaneously composed Origin of German Tragic Drama, Benjamin gave expression to this uncanny resonance by introducing, next to some other concepts, the notion of the expressionless (das Ausdruckslose). In the essay, he states that the expressionless follows every work of art like a sad shadow of

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death by smashing its whole into an agglomeration of pieces (zum Stückwerk zerschlägt) and by forcing its aesthetic harmony to quiver and tremble (“Goethes Wahlverwandschaften” 116). This rendering of the uncanny, which stresses the disaggregate composition of the work of art (das Bruchstückhafte am Kunstwerk; “Zentralpark” 690), finds its rich elaboration in Benjamin’s conception of allegory from The Origin of German Tragic Drama. In this book, “a torso of a symbol” from the essay on Goethe (“Goethes Wahlverwandschaften” 116) transforms into a “desolate confusion of execution sites” (Der Ursprung 401), which testifies to history’s misguidances. In such a devastated world, the work of art cannot be anything other than a patchwork of remnants, which postpones its completion to an unpredictable future (355, 362). Linking commemoration to postponement, Benjamin resumes the German Romanticism’s weak messianism. Next to Benjamin and Freud, the uncanny feeling of unhomeliness in the world following the First World War also haunted Heidegger, as his careful reader Derrida did not fail to notice. In a 2001 round-table discussion, Derrida himself confessed that das Unheimliche (in the meaning both of the uncanny and unhomeliness) is one of his philosophy’s most important obsessions: So I try to understand what das Unheimliche means in this German epoch, the first part of the twentieth century—why is it the best name, the best concept, for something which resists consistency, system, semantic identity? Why is it the experience, the most thinking experience in Freud and in Heidegger? Following theory 35

Emerging in the traumatic aftermath of the Second World War, Derrida’s thought is obsessed with the rise of das Unheimliche after the First World War because he, like Benjamin, obviously feels attached to the agencies stranded in their presents. It appears to him, as it did to them, that the present is sentenced to the “discontinuity of standing alone without a companion” (Schad 188–189). That is to say, its past lost familiarity. It withdrew into a sort of ‘spectral existence’ or ‘exile’, forcing the thinker who wants to draw on the tradition of thinking into a kind of uncanny encounter. To be loyal to this ghostly Doppelgänger, he or she must betray the political rules of his or her present, without ever being certain that he or she is carrying out this betrayal of politics in favor of ethics in an appropriate way (Derrida, “Following theory” 11). “This is very dangerous and you have no guarantee. […] Ethics is dangerous” (32–33). Derrida’s delineated translation of the relationship between the thinker and his or her tradition into an uncanny encounter with a spectral agency

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powerfully resonates in Paul de Man’s well-known essay “Autobiography as Defacement”. Paul de Man was, after all, not solely Derrida’s ‘companion’ but also a well-known inheritor of both the early Romanticist legacy and Benjamin’s concept of allegory (see his The Rhetoric of Romanticism and Allegories of Reading). Being himself haunted by the Second World War’s trauma— although from another side, that of the ‘perpetrator’—in the addressed essay he renders the relationship between the autobiographer’s present and past self in analogously spectral terms. The autobiographer’s present self finds himself or herself at the graveside of his or her forever lost past self. Accordingly, De Man defines the autobiographic relationship as an “epitaphic discourse,” or “the fiction of an apostrophe to an absent, deceased, or voiceless entity, which posits the possibility of the latter’s reply and confers upon it the power of speech” (“Autobiography” 75–76). The present self does not only confer language ability upon the past self but also a face. By thus bestowing speech and a face to the silent defaced, the autobiography “veils a defacement […] of which it is itself the cause” (81). Due to this paradox that the veil smuggles back into the action of its elimination, any established face comes, sooner or later, to be defaced. The bygone self not only eludes to the imposed identification but undoes it. The autobiographer does not manage to repair the loss laid in the foundation of the self. That which ultimately drives him or her beyond his or her knowledge is, after all, not so much the childhood as the ‘true’ place of his or her belonging. Being “enamored of distance,” he or she is instead entrapped in longing (Stewart 23). While striving to retake possession of its ‘object’, autobiography involuntarily demonstrates a “desire for desire”. Although it intentionally operates as a goaloriented wish, by yearning for that which it cannot possess, it actually functions as an uncontrollable nostalgia. Inasmuch as the childhood recollection is mobilized by a wound inflicted by history, its trigger is located beyond the self that memorizes, persistently “screening” or “covering” or “veiling” his or her memories.2 Through such a displacement of the past induced by the self’s 2  The concept of “screen memory” was introduced by Freud who in fact speaks of covered (verdeckte) or covering (verdeckende) memories (“Über Deckerinnerungen”), which is closer to de Man’s metaphor of “veiling”. He defines that which is in today’s English usually rendered as “screen memories”, in their negative version, as sorts of defense reactions that are regularly linked with repression, displacement, and inhibitions (“Über Deckerinnerungen” 536–537, 551). More recently, Hirsch describes them as “[t]he images already imprinted on our brains, the tropes and structures we bring from the present to the past, hoping to find them there and to have our questions answered”. They “mask other images and other, as yet unthought or unthinkable, concerns” (Hirsch 42). “Perhaps the family pictures themselves

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striving to suppress his or her bitter present, he or she is dispossessed of the same ‘origin’ that he or she is at pains to invoke for the sake of compensation. If the past self thus escapes final identification, its evidence turns out to be spectral. For this reason, its remembrance cannot possibly be harmoniously completed as Aleida Assmann suggests with her recourse to the Greek idea of the symbolon cut in half. She claims that, as soon as an object or place that was abandoned in the past activates present resonances in the bodily archive that she calls me-memory (mich-Gedächtnis), the symbolon’s once severed parts happily reconnect (Der lange Schatten 122). But as Benjamin’s “torso of a symbol” indicates, the symbol’s remnant inhabits space and time beyond those of its memorizer, which means that Assmann’s metaphor of symbolon disregards the historical fractures that trigger the childhood recollections. Due to traumas, war, exile, or the massive erasures of records characteristic of totalitarian regimes, which disrupt all heritage lines, “ ‘[h]ome’ becomes a place of no return” (Hirsch 212). Beyond the will and wish of its memorizer, it becomes the place of affiliative rather than familial memory, which means that the relationship to it encompasses a much larger collective than just family in its transmission (36). Such multiple mediation dispossesses the memorizer of any certainty with regard to his or her self. To prevent confrontation with the uncanny feeling of unhomeliness that follows from such dispossession, he or she defends himself or herself by developing the illusion that any surviving images from the past “have a memory of their own that they bring to us from the past; that memory tells us something about ourselves, about what/how we and those who preceded us once were” (52). To underpin this illusion, he or she engages the familial trope as “a powerful idiom of remembrance in the face of detachment and forgetting” (48). Both childhood recollections that I shall try to interlock in the following reading—Walter Benjamin’s Berlin Childhood around 1900 and Miroslav Krleža’s A Childhood in Agram 1902–1903—engage childhood, in a wishful and retroactive projection, as a screen that absorbs the present shock, filters the impact of the present trauma and diminishes its harm. In such a way, rather than offering a safe abode to the exiled self, his remedial image of childhood conjures up his counterfactual pasts, alternate identities and missed itineraries (Fritzsche 124–127). Operating as an inexhaustible source of his longing rather than the firm place of his belonging, it does not abolish his unhomeliness but, on the contrary, unleashes its itinerancy. This is how childhood recollections, in the manner of all trauma narratives, turn dispossession into a privilege. By acting are mere screen memories recalling a pre-historic time and masking an unbearable visual landscape, a shadow archive, with ‘pre-formed’ figures of destruction” (51).

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as the invisible “engineers of collective memory,” their narrators stimulate scattered addressees with similarly effaced lineages, dispersed communities, and damaged lives to join the community of the dispossessed. All collateral and anonymous victims of the so-called great history are invited to meet in the operation of “a permanent itinerancy which […] freed itself from the social bonds of home”. In the idea of its engineers, this supposed freedom makes itinerancy into “the substance of […] individuality” (180). In fact, already in the age of Romanticism, the defaced and displaced historical agencies had invented individuality as the new form of identificationat-a-distance, at the service of which the remembrance of the lost past was placed. As Kaja Silverman pertinently remarked, such a narratively mediated identification, driven by a curious “appetite for alterity,” bridges enormous distances across national, linguistic and cultural differences. It goes out of one’s self and out of one’s own cultural norms in order to align this self, through displacement, with distant others (Silverman 181). This is why the recollections of the lost past, through the discursive implanting and medial dissemination of their memories, managed to turn their private melancholy into a political force. Opposing the victorious history by stressing the prevalence of loss, they stimulated their scattered addressees to think of themselves as the legatees of a peculiar and distinct past. Along the lines of such ‘elective affinities’, they silently forged a kind of counter-community. A good century thereafter, when, with the First World War, historical catastrophes acquired global proportions, the remembrances of the lost past invited the masses of these catastrophes’ victims to give expression to their defacement by reimagining and reconfiguring the inimical world they were faced with. Thanks to the introduction of such a platform, next to other platforms of course, anonymous individuals across the world suddenly “felt themselves as contemporaries, as occupants of a common time with mutually recognizable personalities” (Fritzsche 10). They became able “to connect their personal ordeals with larger social narratives” (8). The remembrances of the lost past thus pulled together writers and readers who felt themselves as victims of the great history’s lethal mechanism. However, if memory, while it opposes history, becomes itself a historical force, then the relationship between memory and history cannot be adequately rendered in purely oppositional terms.3 It is true that memory claims to be 3  Aleida Assmann claims the same but proposes to replace the opposition between memory and history with a permanent interplay between them (Erinnerungsräume 133–142). According to her hermeneutic interpretation, they dialogically amend one another. I instead interpret their relationship in spectral, uncanny terms, which makes one operate as the

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speaking in the name of the past, as opposed to history that speaks in the name of the present. However the past itself is not original, as memory claims it is, but a retroactive ascription of the self’s present needs, debts and affiliations. Instead of following the memorizer in naturalizing this ascription, one is better advised to uncover the past’s interrelated composition. It is not the self, ultimately, that drives and shapes his or her memory operations but the traumatic constellation, the involuntary constituent of which he or she is at the given moment. This constellation not only generates his or her unhomeliness but also provides various institutions, technologies, and media that enable coming to terms with it. This is the clandestine way in which the historical development is smuggled into the workings of memory that are at pains to counter it. Instead of siding with either memory or history, which strive to obliterate their mutually enabling and disabling intertwinement, the following readings will insist on the haunting legacy of one in the other in order to elucidate their politics of the other’s oblivion.

Walter Benjamin’s Berlin Childhood Around 1900

While it scrutinizes the minute sensations of an infant’s daily life to save them from historical oblivion and erasure, Benjamin’s Berlin Childhood heals the wounds of an adult caught up in an historical catastrophe. He wrote and rewrote on his autobiographic sketches from 1932–1938, i.e. shortly before and within the period of Hitler’s seizure of power, which forced him into exile. However, the threatening developments started much earlier. Weimar Germany, established after the defeat of German Empire in the First World War and shattered by humiliating territorial losses, the political transformation into a republic, and a large influx of ‘homecomers’, had already engaged a variety of remedial, compensatory, and restorationist political agendas. In order to divert the residents’ attention from the impotent state with its damaged institutions, Weimar haunting, disturbing legacy of the other. This means that I agree with Hirsch, who criticizes Jan and Aleida Assmann’s rendering of memory for its neglect of ruptures and discontinuities (Hirsch 33). However, the same neglect characterizes Hirsch’s own distinction between memory, which is conceived as embodied knowledge, and postmemory, which is based on imaginative investments and projections at a generational remove (5–6). The question is whether, in a fractured world, embodied knowledge can exist at all. However she corrects herself in the later course of her argument by pointing out a continuous overlapping of these seeming opposites, which, however, never succeeds in obliterating the gap between them (82–83).

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Germany led a politics of Germandom (Deutschtumspolitik), which oriented its ethnonationalism toward co-nationals in the borderlands and the newly established nation-states (the so-called Grenz- und Auslandsdeutschen). Such a redefinition of the German nation to include these border and transborder co-nationals induced in its turn the exclusion of non-German co-citizens at home, above all the Jews. This enforced closing-off from the non-national compatriots—as a ‘volksnational’ measure that had already been introduced in Wilhelmine Germany4—spawned the rise of antisemitism in the Weimar Republic that confronted German Jews with uneasy choices. Under such sinister circumstances, Benjamin had already considered the possibility of emigration in the immediate aftermath of the First World War. He confided in his friend Ernst Schoen in 1919 that he saw a departure from Europe to America “as a necessity” (Gesammelte Briefe II 23). A few years later, following the emergence of Zionism, only the destination had changed, with America being replaced by Palestine (although he was against territorial Zionism). He wrote to Florens Christian Rang in 1923 that he needed to emigrate because he could not fulfil his mission in Europe (370). In another letter, directed against some of his more shortsighted friends, he revealed the cosmopolitan idea of Europe to be a fallacy (368). For a clairvoyant person like him, Europe was approaching its catastrophe. In her seminal analysis of Benjamin’s endless deliberations about his emigration from Europe, Vivian Liska enlists the following reasons pro this emigration: the first confrontations with Zionism, the need to learn Hebrew in order to extend his intellectual horizon, the emigration of his friends, an increasing sense of isolation, the rise of antisemitism and conservatism in academic circles that rejected his doctoral thesis, the economic hardship, the growing feeling that Europe was no longer a place for the Jews, and an increasing sense of Europe’s irreparable decay (Liska 35–36).5 However, a farewell from Europe proved to be anything but an easy matter, which made Benjamin continuously postpone it despite his situation worsening by the day. In fact, his “Zionism of the spirit” drew heavily on his hyphenated Jewish-European identity (Gesammelte Briefe I 71), which in his case 4  In Bismarck’s Prussian state (1871–1890) the Staatsangehörigkeit did not presuppose the Volkszugehörigkeit, which is why it, for instance, excluded Austrian Germans but included the French in Alsace-Lorraine, Danes in North Schleswig and Poles in eastern Prussia. Wilhelmine Germany (1890–1918), however, sought to “ethnicize” this “reichsnational” citizenship law (Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood 51–52). 5  I owe all references to Benjamin’s writings from the above and the following two paragraphs to Liska’s article.

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implied Europe as a “writing factory” and the “institution of production” of his thinking (Gesammelte Briefe II 368). That is to say, Europe as a ‘workshop’ provided instruments and operations, but their perilous constellation required a reconfiguration. Benjamin’s subversive thought could hardly have imagined a better room for its critical and experimental maneuvering. He could subscribe to Karl Kraus’s famous statement that the Jews were “fated to dissolve entirely into their surrounding cultures, and nevertheless still remain a ferment in them” (Eine Krone für Zion 23). This historically allocated internal exteriority generated, at least in Europe, the Jewish mission of an ongoing reinvention of ‘given facts,’ a sort of “secular version of the chosen people’s” mission (Beller 217) that took advantage of the “zone of indistinction” into which the Jews were relegated in post-imperial Europe. In 1938, at the time when he completed the final version of Berlin Childhood in French exile, Benjamin celebrated this “marvelous room for maneuver” (herrlicher Spielraum) with the significant remark that “the catastrophe will not know it” (Gesammelte Briefe VI 112). Vivian Liska elucidates this pregnant statement in the following way: The catastrophe will not know the room for maneuver as genuine to the free thinking bereft of preconditions because it knows only that which is already pre-given and pre-thought. In it, there is no opening onto alterity and no exit. Not knowing this room for maneuver—its necessity and possibility—is the catastrophe. (47) It is, according to Liska, precisely Benjamin’s hesitation to leave Europe, or to bereave his Jewishness of it, that creates this room for maneuver and thus counters the catastrophe. This marvelous room would disappear if he would simply choose one of these two options or dialectically translate them into a sort of synthesis. It only can emerge through a hesitant intertwinement of these opposites, through an undecidable conversion of the one in the other. In other words, the only operation that “gives hope” for salvation from the catastrophe is a permanent “bungling” (verpfuschen) of the act of passing judgment (Gesammelte Briefe II/2 431). “The postponement,” writes Benjamin, “is the hope of the defendant—he merely wants to prevent the trial from transforming into a verdict” (Gesammelte Schriften II/2 427). In an analysis of the condition of Central Europe from 1923, Benjamin alternatively describes such maneuvering as “a more or less clear irony with which the life of an individual claims to be developing with regard to the existence of a community in which he or she is stranded” (Gesammelte Schriften IV/3 919). Thus instead of leaving Europe he transformed its historical pressure into his personal memory’s room for maneuver. A German Jew who is at pains to create

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such room to save himself from the catastrophe in a community that suddenly dispossessed him of his rights, is the point of departure for the following reading of Berlin Childhood around 1900. This collection of vignettes, composed in a defense reaction of personal memory against the official history, comes into being through a consistent reanimation of the traumatic present’s denied constituents. Small wonder it is situated in the time around 1900, which still predominantly spared the Jews of the consequences of Wilhelm II’s politics of ‘ethnicization’. On the eve of the following deterioration, their vast majority still renounced Jewish religious and cultural peculiarity by adhering to German constitutional values, German as their mother tongue, and the Enlightenment ideal of a “man without qualities”. Their assimilation and acculturation had an almost half-century tradition. Despite the gradual rise of antisemitism from the early 1880s onwards, their alignment with Protestantism was firm (Beller 152–155) and the Zionist idea of a Jewish Palestine had little appeal to them. Since Wilhelm II’s aggressive rhetoric of “unmixing” was foremost directed against the Slavs in Eastern borderlands (Thum), Berlin Jews were mostly protected from it before the establishment of the Weimar Republic. Next to this, at the turn of the century, Berlin became a world power’s booming metropole with almost two million residents. The city’s upcoming historical upheavals, devastations and divisions were still in store, at least on the prescient horizon of an eight year child. In such a ‘pre-historical’ landscape, no constraints were put on the small boy’s mobile experience of reality which, so my thesis goes, is engaged to exempt the adult self’s experience from its presently imposed immobility. As an outsider, the boy activates imaginary scenarios in situations which the adults automatically decode by using habitual knowledge. In a vignette devoted to the Victory Column, the narrator addresses the celebration of the Emperor Wilhem II’s protégé, the President of the South African Republic Paulus “Ohm” Krüger, which was organized in 1902 in the Tauentzienstraße after his return from defeat at the Second Boer War.6 People adored him because, as it was officially said, he “led a war”. This diplomatic rendering, as every adult at the time knew, on the one hand, avoided mentioning that he had lost that war (against 6  Since such commemoration rituals were part of Wilhelm II’s ‘fatherland-politics’, the South African President’s name was “Germanized” into Krüger (from the original Kruger). The narrator addresses the state-governed indoctrination of citizenship, for instance by reporting about the following public inscription in the Berlin Zoo: “Work is the citizen’s ornament, blessing the reward for toil” (Berliner Kindheit 1987 25). In a vignette devoted to the school library, he also mentions the “fatherland poems” and volumes “From the fatherland’s past” (Berliner Kindheit 1980 276). Benjamin eliminated this vignette from the final version.

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Great Britain) and, on the other, alluded to his former victory over the British allies in 1896, for which he had received Wilhelm II’s official congratulations. But the formulation confuses the child who does not find it “unobjectionable”: “It was as if a man would ‘lead’ a rhinoceros or camel and acquire his fame for that” (Berliner Kindheit 1987 16). It is hard to overhear in this allegedly infantile comment the bitter irony of an adult who had meanwhile witnessed numerous grotesque celebratory marches. Wilhelm II’s commemoratory rituals, after all, were modest in comparison with the spectacular Nazi sequel. No wonder that the boy, indoctrinated as he was by the annual ritual commemorations of the German victory over the French army at the 1871 Battle of Sedan and slightly disappointed by the festive welcome organized in honor of a suspect South African hero, asks himself “what after all can come after Sedan” (16) if not only parades in its honor. This is ironic enough but nothing in comparison to his impression according to which “world history seemed to have sunk into its glorious grave, over which this column was the stele” (16). The reader namely knows, as the same vignette’s first two sentences clearly state, that the Column became a “red date on a tear-off calendar” as did the ritual commemoration of the Sedan victory itself. The Weimar Republic canceled the commemoration day in 1919, while the Nazis removed the monument from the Königsplatz in 1938 when Benjamin entrusted the final version of Berlin Childhood to Georges Bataille. Three years later, in an ill-reputed propaganda movie, they aggrandized the same Ohm Krüger whom the child in this book belittles in comparison with the heroes of Sedan. The bitter awareness that history did not reach its glorious standstill with the German victory over the Frenchmen but continued to plot its whimsical ups and downs renders the Nazis’ contemporaneous expectations in similarly infantile terms. As an amateur among the initiated, the child witnesses social rituals that he cannot really understand. He is powerfully engaged where the adults are indifferent. The same vignette contains a passage in which the child pays attention to the vassals instead of, as the adults used to do, to their sovereigns who are depicted in the frescos. This is explained by the vassals’ short stature, which makes them accessible to the child’s visual horizon and, in an earlier version of the manuscript, by the child’s feeling that his parents were not further removed from the present power-keepers than these vassals seem to have been from the past ones. This is why the boy sympathizes with them rather than with their sovereigns (Berliner Kindheit 1980 241).7 The alleged child’s feeling 7  In a vignette on the Berlin Big Zoo, there is a place that parallels this one, stating that the child used to pay attention to the pedestal of the monuments in honor of King Friedrich Wilhelm and Queen Louise “rather than to the sovereigns themselves” because that which

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that his parents were not that remote from the power-keepers of their time stands in such a stark contrast to the enforced unbridgeable gap between the narrator and the Nazi power-keepers that we can hardly overlook its character of a retroactive ascription. Only if we consider the situation of a German Jew in the 1930s, we can understand why the German power-keepers do not enjoy the boy’s sympathy. At the same time, the boy keeps aloof where the adults are passionately engaged. Thus he never enters the spiral passageway encircling the column because its frescos present a series of heroic deeds that, as he fears, will remind him of Doré’s illustrations of Dante’s Hell, with their terribly suffering sinners. What the adults perceive as a realm of grace, he sees as an inferno (Berliner Kindheit 1987 17; 1980 242). Does this clash of perspectives not correspond with Benjamin’s later thesis that all triumphal processions march on the bodies of those who lie on the ground? (“Über den Begriff” 254) While the adults climb the column because they prefer the triumphant top-down perspective, the boy remains on the ground because he adheres to his bottom-up perspective. Observed from this sobering angle of the subordinates, the people who victoriously stood on the top of the column left the impression of small figures from his exercise book with stickers, the figures that he used to stick on the ports, niches and windows of his toy constructions. Being thus, like “dollies”, immobilized in the same history that they so much desired to take into their possession, they appeared to him like “creatures of a blessed arbitrariness”, i.e. firmly captured in their misapprehensions: “An eternal Sunday was around them. Or was it an eternal Sedan commemoration day?” (Berliner Kindheit 1987 17) Is this ‘childish’ witness not recognizably shaped by an adult insight into human illusions? Is the boy not somehow modelled by that which he is at pains to oppose? However, in Benjamin’s collection of autobiographical vignettes, such “witnessing by adoption” (Hartman 9), beyond the indicated “reversed ventriloquism” (Anderson 198) in which the boy speaks with the voice of an adult rather than vice versa, also acquires an additional meaning. In the preface to his collection, Benjamin writes that “the images of his metropolitan childhood are maybe capable, in their interior structure, of pre-forming the latter historical experience”. He hopes that at least “one will be able to notice in them how much the one who is at stake here, was later bereft of the security that was took place on these pedestals, and which was in his mind connected with a maze (Irrgarten) that surrounded them, was “spatially closer” and more attractive to him (Berliner Kindheit 1987 23). I will return to this privileging of the bottom-up perspective that is justified by the boy’s short stature.

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reserved for him in his childhood” (Berliner Kindheit 1987 9–10). Significantly, this formulation conceals that his images foreshadow the upcoming experiences only inasmuch as they result from these experiences’ backshadowing. In other words, what we have here is “a kind of retroactive foreshadowing in which the shared knowledge of the outcome of a series of events by narrator and listener is used to judge the participants in those events as though they should have known what was to come” (Bernstein 16). However, it is not merely that the boy who speaks by using the narrator’s voice is, covertly, already a projection of the latter’s experience and knowledge. Well beyond that, the boy’s phantasy is structured by the architectural and technological achievements that were available to the wealthy bourgeois families’ children in Berlin at the turn of the century. This is a further important aspect of memory’s unconscious introjection of that which it proclaims to be opposing, i.e. historical development. Next to the amazing metropolitan quarters with their marvelous infrastructure in which the hero loves to get lost, or those with beggars and whores that growingly attract his attention, there are numerous Hohenzollern castles that surround Benjamin’s summer residence such as Sanssouci, Wildpark, Neue Palais, Charlottenhof and Babelberg. Besides, there are vistas, such as promenades with carriages and coaches, various shops, store windows, or the sounds of the city train (stations), fire engines, emergency vehicles, fabrics, stock exchanges, trading halls, the gas lanterns, the barrel organ, or the carpet tapping in the inner yard. There are further huge parks, the latest achievements of the park architecture that are obtained with the amazing zoos, groups of sculptures on huge pedestals with reliefs, majestic monuments, villas with friezes and architraves, labyrinths, pavilions, rotundas, water installations, bridges, staircases, turrets, and kiosks. Also, there are huge bourgeois apartments with their spacious living rooms, which are provided with silver buckets, terrines, Delft vases, majolica, the bronze urns, and glass cups; their dining rooms with long extendable dining tables and secret buffets which, in their shafts covered with the gray-green velvet, use to hide whole series of table cutlery, mocha spoons, knife benches, fruit knives, and oyster forks; their sleeping rooms with shell baldachins; their children rooms with secret bookcases, drawers and boxes; their guest rooms; their larders; their kitchen with magic sinks; their loggias as shaded by the roller shutters, carried by caryatids, and provided with a relaxing view onto the inner yards; their mysterious servant rooms; their front rooms with the telephone, chandeliers, oven screen, potted palm, console, guéridon, and the bay window sill; their secret hideaways, dark corridors, stairwells, vestibules, terraces, podiums; and finally with their staffs consisting (from the child’s perspective) of a charwoman, nanny and governess. Finally there

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are—outdoors—the islands for trips, playgrounds, ice rinks, tennis courts, swimming pools, bike halls, meadows for butterfly hunts, hills with family’s summer residences, public reading rooms, the carousel, charades, brass band concerts, and imperial panoramas; next to them—indoors—there are private reading circles in the loggias, secret “candle games”, collecting passions focusing on butterflies, medals or postcards, a construction kit, mom’s sewing kit, a magic laundry closet, glass balls and cubes with various scenes from everyday life, huge folio volumes to be browsed through, picture books and exercise books with stickers, school volumes, the pupil’s reading box with characters, blotter sheets, vocabulary notebooks, dividers, dictionaries, the fishing net and specimen box with ether, cotton wool, head pins, and tweezers for the butterfly hunt, and the box for the butterfly collection. Thus, far from being distinct, individual, and personal, the boy’s memories are embedded, through all these everyday items and facilities, in sophisticated bourgeois structures of perception and fantasy, an outstanding social imaginary and a rich archive of stories and images. That which gave rise to the child’s liberating exemption from the restricted world of adults resulted, paradoxically, precisely from this world’s historical and technological development. As if erasing these multiple adoptions that spontaneously mold the images of his childhood, Benjamin emphasizes the therapeutic effects of their reanimation for the predicament of his exile. In the preface he compares their resurfacing from the suppressed zone of his memory archive with a vaccination. Although the past is socially irrevocable, he says, its personal evocation nevertheless becomes salutary if it takes the form of images that “condensate [sich niederschlägt] the experience of a metropolis in a child of the bourgeois class” rather than the narrative form of a biography (Berliner Kindheit 1987 9). By invoking the operations of the Freudian unconscious, this “condensation” gives the vignettes’ the profile of the so-called Denkbilder. This hybrid genre of the modernist philosophical prose as practiced, for example, by Adorno, Kracauer, Bloch and Wittgenstein, undertakes a reverse processing of time into space, text into image, reflection into intuition, or word into thing. By back-folding the undergone historical unfolding, the Denkbilder engage displacing and mixing operations, cryptic images and mnemic symbols as characteristic of the repertory of the Freudian unconscious. In the same way that the latter confuses the differential logic of the conscious, the Denkbilder, which Benjamin anchors in the mimetic ability of an urban child, disfigure the discursivity of the adult world. This explains why he says that these images do not display embossed (geprägte) forms as characteristic of the “memories of a childhood spent in the countryside” (9). The memories of an urban childhood, on the contrary, systematically disconcert such forms by disseminating indeterminacy into the

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habitual distinctions that characterize the world of adults. They open a room for maneuvering in the world of firm givens, uncovering the hidden zone of their potentiality. In the Denkbild “The Butterfly Hunt,” for example, the narrator describes the young hunter’s wish to dissolve into the air and make himself similar to a butterfly in order to approach his prey unnoticed: The old hunter statute began to reign between us: the more I clung myself to the animal in every fiber, the more butterfly-like I was in my inside, the more this butterfly took the color of human resolution in action and appearance, and finally it was as if his catch was the only price at which I could get hold of my human existence. (20–21) Decades thereafter, memories of this corporeal-sensuous miming find their remote echo in the word Brauhausberg, the name of the butterfly hunts’ location. However, due to having long fallen into oblivion, the word is completely dematerialized and transfigured, which makes “the ineffable”, “with which the childhood’s names confront an adult”, vibrate around it (21). It is precisely this zone of the name’s latency, which manifests itself through such an indeterminate resonance, that the Denkbild is at pains to excavate. The Denkbild’s strategy is to return that which became a constative word or sign back into the condition of a performative name or action. A further case in point is Berlin’s Steglitz neighborhood, which the child associates with a goldfinch (Stieglitz) because he identifies his aunt Lehmann in her Steglitz apartment as being like a goldfinch in its habitat. Like this bird, which through its flight connects all the homesteads at the point where its tribe had once sat scattered, his aunt was familiar with all the family relationships and residences of the numerous settler families in the quarter (31). What in the boy’s phantasy associates his aunt Lehmann with the goldfinch is that both tirelessly establish ‘family resemblances’. Likewise, in the Denkbild “The Mummerehlen,” the narrator invokes how he once condensed the name of aunt (Muhme) Rehlen, who is featured in a well-known nursery rhyme, into a single word Mummerehlen because the word “Muhme” did not mean anything to him. He writes: I learned to mimic myself in the words that were actually clouds. The gift of recognizing similitudes is, after all, a weak remnant of the old compulsion to become and to behave similar. Such a compulsion exert words on me. Not those that make me look like exemplary children, but like apartments, furniture, clothes. (59)

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The delineated flashes of resemblances find their explanation in two essays from the mid-1930s, at the time when Benjamin worked on Berlin Childhood, “The Doctrine of the Similar” and “On the Mimetic Faculty.” Therein he opens a genealogy of his mimetic conception of language, stating that the corporealsensuous miming of others, which characterized pre-modern behavior of humans, gradually gave way to the modern ability of perceiving conceptual similitudes. Even if the development from the immediate sensual miming of things to the linguistically mediated non-sensual resemblances implies a longterm transition, in the final outcome he interprets language as the “most perfect archive” of such resemblances, or “the highest implementation of mimetic faculty”, because it stores, confronts and relates one to another, “the essences of things, their most fleeting and refined substances, even aromas” (“Über das mimetische Vermögen” 209). Storing this genealogy in its memory archive, a linguistic sign is never just a semiotic bearer of signification but also a mimetic bearer of similitude. When Benjamin describes the sudden manifestation of similitude that swallows up the discrete forms of linguistic signs like a “flame” or a “flash” (Aufblitzen; 213), Freud’s flickering-up (Aufleuchten) of memory traces in each discrete human apperception unavoidably comes to mind. In Berlin Childhood, to reiterate, Benjamin engages the Denkbilder to stage such a flashing and flickering-up of the suppressed sensuous mimesis in the linguistically mediated conceptual resemblances. Inasmuch as the latter mediation can impossibly be eliminated, the perception of the sensuous resemblance is in every case bound to an instantaneous flash. It slips past [huscht vorbei], can possibly be regained, but cannot really be held fast, unlike other perceptions. It offers itself to the eye as fleetingly and transitorily as a constellation of stars. The perception of similarities does seem to be bound to a time-moment [Zeitmoment]. The Doctrine of the Similar 66

Berlin Childhood’s Denkbilder represent such instantaneous sensuous flashes in the medium of writing, which is, according to Benjamin, “the sole repository in which the picture-puzzle [Vexierbild] can form itself” (69). In staging similitude’s “unexpected arrivals,” they recall that language never manages to eliminate things from its words, intuitions from its reflections, and images from its texts. Considering that language involuntarily stays with that from which it departs, one should translate Benjamin’s notion of Mitteilbarkeit from “On Language as Such and on the Language of Men”, as Samuel Weber rightly noticed, as parting with rather than as communicability. “The ‘purity’ of language

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as medium would thus consist in the constitutive immediacy of its ‘-ability’ to stay with that from which it parts” (Weber 197). This means that although the human word takes a distance from the non-human thing in order to represent it, it nonetheless incorporates this thing. In spite of its attempt to part ways with the thing, the word shares with it its being.8 Already Benjamin’s early treatise On the Program of Coming Philosophy (1918), in which he criticizes Kant for subordinating the transient forms of experience (Erfahrung) to the formal structure of cognition (Erkenntnis), announces this internally divided profile of language units. Benjamin claims that Kant’s transcendental categories can never get rid of scattered sensuous perceptions because categories are linguistically constructed and language is a rich repository of such perceptions (“Über das Programm der kommenden Philosophie”). However, as history has suppressed and silenced them, memory has to ‘unwind’ the language structures in order to activate them. This can be compared with a roamer who, in order to make the childhood’s forgotten resemblances flicker up, back-folds the unfolded metropolitan structures until they become mysterious labyrinths. In this connection we can recall Benjamin’s flaneur Baudelaire who collects correspondences on the Parisian streets, “the infinitely numerous echoes of any memory to the others” (“Zentralpark” 689). In Berlin Childhood there is a Denkbild titled “The Zoo,” which opens with the passage: To orient oneself in a city does not mean much. To lose oneself in a city in the way one loses oneself in a forest, requires schooling. Then the street names have to speak to the erring as the dry twigs’ cracking does and as the interior city’s small streets mirror the daytime with a clarity of a mountain trough. I learned this art late; it fulfilled the dream, the first traces of which were the labyrinths on the blotters of my notebooks. Berliner Kindheit 1987 23

8  Benjamin’s peculiar conception of language units, which does not allow for their separation from the object that they designate, is directed against the bourgeois one-dimensional understanding of language. In his early treatise “On Language as Such and on the Language of Men”, Benjamin summarizes it as follows: “The means of communication is the word, its object the thing, its addressee the human” (“Über Sprache überhaupt” 144). Whereas the bourgeoisie conceives language as a human communication about something non-human outside it, Benjamin insists that this non-human something mimetically disturbs human linguistic signs from within.

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Another passage from the vignette “The Kaiserpanorama” restates how such labyrinthine roundabouts are the best way for the self to reanimate the lost sense of familiarity with the world’s things: For this was extraordinary with the travels: that their remote world was not always strange and that the longing, which it awakened in me not always lured into the unknown but was sometimes rather an assuaged longing for homecoming. Berliner Kindheit 1980 240

This impression is confirmed in “The folio volumes”, in which it is said: The distant lands which I encountered in them were intimately interwoven like the flakes. And because the distance, when it is snowing, no longer leads into the expanse, but into the interior, Babylon and Baghdad, Akko and Alaska, Tromsö and Transvaal lay in my heart. Berliner Kindheit 1987 27–28

The vignette “The Hideouts” goes even further and evokes the boy’s corporealsensual mimetic ability, which allows him, while hidden behind a curtain and obsessed by his ‘demon’, a metamorphosis into a specter (61). In “The colors” he hides in soap bubbles by enmeshing in such a way into the shimmering of the dome’s colors; in “The Mummerehlen” he disappears in the picture on the porcelain (70; 1980, 263). In Benjamin’s view, such operations that unwind conceptual similarities into labyrinthine sensuous resemblances are not his narrator’s deliberate actions, but rather the compulsive reactions of his memories that were victimized by the development of history. These memories’ precarious situation powerfully triggers them. It is the “nostalgia of the exile,” as he says in the preface (Berliner Kindheit 1987 9), which calls into remembrance his childhood’s scattered ruins. These “dead goods of the past”, he argues elsewhere, offer a foothold to those “who want to step out of the historical progress” (“Zentralpark” 658). Their sharpened attention for what in history is “untimely, painful, and missed” (Der Ursprung 343) folds back the historical progress by compelling it to “bulge from within” (359). The thereby induced explosion entails an agglomeration of ruins without a recognizable sense or connection (363). Benjamin compares them with overcrowded and messy children’s or storage rooms, or magicians’ cabinets, which hesitate to establish an order (363). Their disaggregate condition preserves the memory of the “desolate confusion of execution sites” (401). In the same way Goethe, as we have seen, by smashing his Elective

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Affinities into a heap of fragments (Stückwerk) commemorates the shadow of the death. This explains why, in Berlin Childhood, the salvation of the forgotten infancy entails a loose cluster of vignettes, which Benjamin tirelessly reconfigured up until he was existentially precluded to continue. However, as his consistent reconfiguration never engendered anything other than a conglomerate of remnants, the question of the latter’s ultimate author—the past or the present self—had to be postponed for an unpredictable future. Remaining loyal to Novalis’s dictum that the self has to be reshaped with every (catastrophic) present anew,9 Benjamin disaggregated the narrative of a classic autobiography into a permutable constellation of picture puzzles (Bilderrätsel; 351, 352), puzzle-pictures (Vexierbild, “The Doctrine of the Similar” 69) or puzzling pictures (Rätselbilder) (Berliner Kindheit 1987 34–35). He refused to state the past self, to speak about it as about an inanimate thing, by choosing to perform it in his present self. In this connection, it is worth recalling Derrida’s aforementioned claim that the past self is a Doppelgänger, which disconcerts the present self’s consistency by his interventions from ‘beyond’. In his essay on Goethe’s Elective Affinities, Benjamin describes how this uncanny intrusion of the spectral past self into the present self’s actions transforms his sovereign narrative statement into a performance of something ‘beyond’ it: In the dramatic, the mystery is that moment in which the dramatic penetrates from the domain of language that is genuine to it into a higher one that is out of its reach. It can therefore never be expressed in words, but merely and exclusively in the visual performance, it is the ‘dramatic’ in the strictest understanding. Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften 135

This passage suggests that the “mystical” force which governs the fragmented performance of Berlin Childhood is beyond its reach.10 Because it constitutively 9  In fact, Benjamin extends the validity of Novalis’s idea to the whole realm of history: “The course of history, as it presents itself under the notion of catastrophe, does not oblige a thinking man more than a kaleidoscope in a child’s hand, in which with every turn all that is orderly collapses to a new order” (“Zentralpark” 660). 10  Here and in the following, I am alluding to Derrida’s reading of Benjamin in “The Force of Law”, which is significantly subtitled as “The ‘mystical foundation of authority’ ” (”The Force of Law”). Why is this foundation mystical? My thesis is that Benjamin grants the authority that subscribes to his texts (and any phenomenon whatsoever such as words,

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escapes identification, it can be merely acted out or corporeally mimed, but not worked through or discursively pinned down. Berlin Childhood’s fragments come into being in such a way that past memories pierce through layers of oblivion by wounding and unsettling the present self (Hirsch 62). They are “touching insights” that through their instantaneous flashes, in Barthes’s vocabulary, establish a sort of “umbilical cord” with the self’s past (Barthes, Camera Lucida 80). In his “Theses on the Philosophy of History”, which were composed immediately after Benjamin finished his Berlin Childhood, he speaks of a “memory as it flashes up at the moment of danger” (“Über den Begriff” 253). By “flashing up” he seems to be indicating that memory instantaneously, as it were, takes possession of the historian, explodes into his or her present, distracting his or her attention and rearticulating the latter’s habitual priorities. Grabbing hold of the historian, it acts much like Levinas’s “face”, which breaks in, befalls, and persecutes the self (Levinas, “The Trace of the Other” 51). This interruption from “elsewhere” blasts open the continuum of the self’s history, replacing its smooth transmission with the series of displacing encounters. It liberates the unlimited possibility of the discontinuous and plural “living time” from the linear and homogeneous “fate” of historical temporality (Levinas, “Ethics” 139–45). Since the French word visage, etymologically read, means precisely “targeting”, Levinas insists that the face’s targeting prevents the self from taking it into cognizance. In the same way Benjamin insists that it is the spectral past self that takes into possession the present one. Being exposed to the past self’s accusing “gaze,” the present self is catapulted out of its protected abode. This is how Berlin Childhood’s Denkbilder present their own emergence. The past commands their performance through its interventions from the labyrinthine underground. To underline this, the book concludes with the Denkbild “The buckled little man” in which the boy stops in front of the gates of the basement hatches, behind which, as his dreams tell him, the gnomes with the pointed caps cast their underground glances on the observer (Berliner Kindheit 1987 78). Being accustomed to watching humans and things from below, as we have seen, the boy identifies with them. However, such a bottom-up gaze turns out to be disconcerting and harmful. As the popular verses on the buckled little man make clear, the one who is gazed at by him loses concentration, becomes absent-minded and clumsy, makes mistakes and thereby causes damage to his things, or works of art) an unquestioned right to a state of exception. In his complex argument, the ultimate agency that enjoys this right is life (in Zur Kritik der Gewalt 202– 203 moreover bloßes Leben or bare life, which in its turn inspired Agamben for his key category).

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or her property. Since the little man’s gaze is in its turn, thanks to its hideout, protected from being disclosed, this peril appears to be as unavoidable as death itself: The little man came before me everywhere. […] I have never seen him. He exclusively always saw me. Berliner Kindheit 1987 79

A passage that Benjamin eliminated from the final version elucidates why the narrator associates this little man from the underground with the abyss of the death: I imagine that this “whole life”, which people say passes before the eyes of the dying, consists of such images, which the little man has of us all. Berliner Kindheit 1980 304

These images zip past at a cinematographic speed, making themselves perceivable in their fleeting sequence for just a second. Benjamin spells out in “The Doctrine of the Similar” how such a comprised sequence of “instantaneous flashes” that are “bound to a time-moment” “offers itself to the eye as fleetingly and transitorily as a constellation of stars” (“The Doctrine of the Similar” 66). If we further consider his “Theses on the Philosophy of History”, we can infer that the images, which the little man has of us all, are selected by “a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger” (“Über den Begriff” 253). Accordingly, the buckled little man figures as this buried memory’s very embodiment. Everybody is fully ignorant of it but it stores in its archive much more than any voluntary memory. And when the narrator says that “the little man has the images of me as well” and then enlists the Denkbilder, which the reader has just left behind, this means that their profile and selection were shaped by his endangered memory. Summoned as he was by its inarticulate ‘voice from the grave’,11 11  The narrator compares the little man’s voice with the “hum of the incandescent mantle of a gas lantern” that reaches him “across the century threshold” (Berliner Kindheit 1987 79). By displaying such a voice, next to his ability to see everything without being seen, his “original language” of “pure communication” (“Language and Proximity” 119), his instantaneous appearance that “withdraws before entering” (“Phenomenon and Enigma” 66) and his demanding “my responsibility for the death of the Other” (“Ethics as First Philosophy” 86)—Benjamin’s buckled little man powerfully reminds us of Levinas’s “face”. In terms of De Man’s “Autobiography as De-Facement”, Levinas’s “death of the Other” could be interpreted as the death of my past self.

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the narrator merely took care to give expression to it. Adhering to it in a ventriloquistic manner, he lent his pen to the buckled little man in the same way that, in the first fragment of his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” the chess playing puppet lent its hand to the buckled dwarf who was hidden within it and capable of winning every chess game. However, as I have tried to argue in the introductory part, the buried memory is not the ultimate agent of Benjamin’s Denkbilder but their retroactive mystification, mobilized by the narrator’s desperate need for his allegedly lost infantile freedom. To ‘compensate for’ this loss, he introduces childhood as the object which, apparently, he was violently dispossessed of. While performing it in his memories, in order to counter the forces of oblivion, he is convinced that the evoked images will, once in the future, eliminate the loss. Hence the childhood is engaged as “a powerful idiom of remembrance” (Hirsch 48) against the historical rupture that ‘befell’ the memorizer. This remembrance, though, emerges from an amnesia that is located amidst historical continuity. “Awareness of being embedded in secular, serial time, with all its implications of continuity, yet of ‘forgetting’ the experience of this continuity, […] engenders the need for a narrative of ‘identity’ ” (Anderson 205). In other words, the recollected images are historically induced, “already imprinted on our brains, the tropes and structures we bring from the present to the past, hoping to find them there and to have our questions answered”. They “mask other images and other, as yet unthought or unthinkable concerns” (Hirsch 42), i.e. they operate as “screen memories recalling a pre-historic time and masking an unbearable visual landscape” in the present that is in its turn saturated with the “figures of destruction” (51). This retroactive animation is the manner in which autobiography, in Paul De Man’s pregnant phrase, “veils a defacement […] of which it is itself the cause” (“Autobiography” 81). To be sure, Benjamin’s Berlin Childhood does not hide this veiling but, on the contrary, insists on the failure of memory to turn the place of the narrator’s longing into the place of his or her belonging.12 But precisely by passionately attaching himself to the childhood as a place of no return he assists in creating a silent community of the victims of history. They are expected to meet in the operation of “a permanent itinerancy, which […] freed itself from the social bonds of home” (Fritzsche 180). In such a way, instead of abolishing 12  Compare the following statement from the first version of the manuscript: “Never again can we completely recover the forgotten. And that may be good. The chock of retrieval would be so destructive that we would immediately cease to understand our longing. But so we understand it, and the better the deeper the forgotten resides in us” (Berliner Kindheit 1980 267).

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unhomeliness, they turn it into a privilege by forming an interior space of freedom as an indeterminable residue of all identity ascriptions and an invisible remnant of all social attributions. It becomes “the substance of […] individuality” (180), the silent rule of which reads “I am what I am not” (Luhmann, “Individuum” 244). The German sociologist Niklas Luhmann has described this modernist project of the consistent abandonment of all short-term identity interests for elusive long-term benefits, stating that “an individual can see himor herself only as an unfinished and interminable process, an inherent activity of striving and becoming” (215). An individual can come into being exclusively through a continuous self-negation. Those who are unconsciously driven by an insatiable infatuation into radical alterity and thus pushed into unhomeliness, establish through their “identification-at-a-distance” a new historical force. By stressing the experience of loss, Benjamin’s remembrance of his lost childhood invited its scattered individual addressees to think of themselves, along the lines of ‘elective affinities,’ as a kind of counter-community. After such sacrificial narratives introduced a new platform of commonality, their addressees suddenly “felt themselves as contemporaries”, as “the legatees of a distinct past” and “occupants of a common time” (Fritzsche 10). This is how Benjamin’s politics of remembrance, by lending its voice to the disempowered, accomplished an empowerment. By sharing his loss with the others, synchronizing with them his castrated past, and connecting his personal ordeals with larger social narratives, his performance of personal nostalgia endorsed the creation of a new messianic community.

Miroslav Krleža’s A Childhood in Agram in 1902–03

The location that generates Krleža’s memories is the Croatian capital Zagreb, which at the time still carried the name of Agram, as imposed by the AustroHungarian rulers. Until 1918 Croatia belonged to the Dual Monarchy’s Hungarian part that was politically and economically substantially less developed than the Austrian part and, on the top of that, was impregnated by hegemonic Hungarian nationalism. (Judson, “Marking National Space” 131) Nonetheless, a revolution in communication and the expansion of transport infrastructures during the Monarchy’s last decades substantially increased the population of Agram, which managed to reach about 60,000 inhabitants at the turn of the century—still more than thirty times less than Benjamin’s Berlin. Next to this huge asymmetry, around 1900, Berlin was the capital of a booming empire, in which an expansive imperial politics was created, while Agram was the center of an imperial borderland that was subjected to a doubly frustrated

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imperial politics.13 This implies not only a completely different political status, institutional infrastructure, and urban scape but also a substantially different self-consciousness, experience and life-orientation. In such a context, a comparison between Benjamin’s and Krleža’s childhood books might probably appear overstretched. But important concordances exist as well. Both works emerged from the bitter experience of dispossession as induced by the breakup of empires, Benjamin’s at the eve of the Holocaust and Krleža’s amidst it (1942). In the turbulent post-imperial atmosphere with its growing sense of displacement and catastrophe, Jewish and Croatian frustrations were of an almost opposite kind, since the Jews were imperiled by the rise of nationalisms whereas the Croats longed for their national autonomy. The pressure put on the collectives, of course, does not homogenize all individual responses to it as individuals sometimes hesitate to join the manner in which the majority of their co-fellows react to this pressure. Benjamin’s and Krleža’s responses certainly belong to this group. The time that Krleža evokes was characterized by the rise of a Croatian national consciousness as manifested in demonstrations against the Hungarian Banus Khuen-Hédérvary in 1902–1903. Krleža addresses them in his remembrances, speaking of a “nationally endangered form of a disquieted political consciousness”, the “first twitches” of an “unconscious political resistance,” which—in association with the tortured saints and martyrs and executed national heroes Petar Zrinski and Fran Krsto Frankopan, whose figures preoccupy his childhood—disconcert and terrify the boy (Djetinjstvo 1972 20). But it is equally possible that the boy’s apparent obsession with the “persecutions of early Christians”, the “flogging, Golgotha, Calvary”, the “escapes, arrests, and night interrogations”, the everyday funerals (19) as well as the “cataracts of greasy, black, venous blood” (17), is but a back-projection of the narrator’s later experiences. These comprise, during the First World War and first Yugoslavia, not to speak about the Nazi puppet regime in Croatia at the time Krleža composes his memories, a “lethal danger, tyranny, political and war terror”, the “bloodsheds”, and “sadistic propaganda” (20).14 As regards the 13  “Doubly” in the sense that the Dual Monarchy was frustrated by Wilhelmine Germany and that, within it itself, the Hungarians were frustrated by the Austrians. 14  As if summarizing these experiences, he remarks in his “Notes from the Year 1942”: “It is much for a human life to be in Skopje casemates (as a safe candidate of the darkness), or to experience a year ago all that I had the honor to experience” (“Zapisi” 412). (The first experience refers to his arrest in Skopje in 1913 when he wanted to check into the Serbian army for the Second Balkan War but was accused of espionage. The latter experience refers to the establishment of the Independent State of Croatia as a Nazi puppet state on

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Second World War experiences, “in these days (of horror and shame) it would be best to truly sleep, and even better to be a stone”, he writes in his “Notes from the Year 1942” (“Zapisi” 414). Recalling 1914 in 1942, he remarks that “European civilization lied on the catafalque already in that year and its agony did not change. We are dying. Nothing has changed in these twenty-eight years” (409). In 1942 the wound was opened. The Sava no longer runs from Slovenia but from the Reich. […] The border of the German Reich is nearby Samobor. […] The Sava murmurs, from Sevnica and Krško the armored trains run, it is dark, the guards are crossing the bridge at Brežice, a shooting at Kostanjevica and Krka and Čatež. (431)15 In a diary entry from 1952 Krleža addresses his “black vigilances, dark as ink, and somber as a flood of red resin” (crnih, kao mastilo mračnih, i kao poplava krvave smole tmastih bdijenja) at the time of the Independent State of Croatia (“Epilog” 168). Under such traumatic circumstances, no wonder that an entry from 28 June 1942 reminds us of the terrifying feeling of a fatal downfall into the abyss, with which Benjamin’s book concludes: This madness tightens the diaphragm in a permanent sense of a fatal downfall. We are landing. We will hit the ground. Bang, crash. We are afraid. The silence, the horror of solitude and abandonment. Left in a complete solitude, we are spat on like a discarded corpse. (442) The delineated trauma of Zagreb’s Nazi period mobilizes Krleža’s excursion into his early childhood. At the time he composes his remembrances, he has already experienced the collapse of the Dual Monarchy, the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, and the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. At the time he prepares them for print (1952), this reign of exceptional states was completed by his experience of the Independent State of Croatia. Finally, at the time he revises it for the second edition (1972), the collapse of the so-called Croatian Spring (1971) must have underlined the feeling that “the state of exception, in which we live, is the rule,” as Benjamin exemplarily formulated in 1940 for many 10 April 1941, when the curfew was introduced and the police chase launched. Krleža and his wife feared they would be arrested, and the police did break into their apartment, but with the warning that “the water is poisoned” (“Zapisi” 427; see also 441)). He interprets his entire generation as having been sentenced to “thirty-year wars from 1912–1942” (432). 15  The Sava is a river that runs through Zagreb, and all other localities are in the city’s close surroundings.

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representatives of his generation (“Über den Begriff der Geschichte” 254, italics mine). However, post-imperial Europe’s permanent state of exception was already looming large on the horizon of Krleža’s borderland childhood. We learn from the book that, although Agram was, at the time, a marginal imperial capital, it was nonetheless, due to the Empire’s reconstruction, familiar with technological achievements such as the microscope, telescope, binoculars, magic glasses (44), magical lanterns (16,19), the magnifying glass panorama (17–18), kaleidoscope (16), railways (17), hot air balloons (16, 18–19), photography, heliography, oleography (44), and newspapers. In an imperial shatterzone, they clashed in the boy’s imagination with the distant past relicts such as the church ceremonies, lamentations, jeremiads, mysteries, Passion play, Calvary, religious and quasi-religious lyrics, altars, angels, shepherds, the (imaginary) kings, queens, princes, nobles, gladiators, tortures, and battlefields (19–20).16 The reading of Darwin and Haeckel (70), meteorological and agronomic devices and forecasts (73), postal, telegraph, and firefighters (83) collided with the powerful feudal consciousness (20), the church incense, candles and flowers (13–14), the pungent school floors and class-comrades’ clothes (82), and grandmother’s pagan superstition (72–82). The images of martyrdom, wars, and disasters clashed with the heavenly scenes of moonlight (18), stars (16), and sun; the half-dark atmosphere of the church and petty bourgeois rooms, as well as funeral processions, opposed the limelight of the theatre stage (14), circus (16), and the masked ball (85), as well as the brass band concerts in the central park (84). The enchanting world of The Thousand Nights and Jules Verne’s novels (78) sharply contrasted against the odor of the brothels and adultery on Kožarska Street (102–103). Next to all these disconcerting clashes as characteristic of the geopolitical borderlands, Krleža lives the age of transition of the Christian bourgeois civilization that had carefully masked the bestial nature of humans, into the secular socialist one that openly discloses it. Socialist movements were knowingly much more powerful in East Central Europe than in West Europe. The narrator makes clear that he grew up in the atmosphere of social rottenness 16  The simultaneity of the non-simultaneous is the (post-)imperial borderlands’ transhistorical destiny. In a short passage which refers to the situation of writing (1942), the noise of the peasant dray clashes with that of tires (101). That is to say, nothing had changed in forty years. In a sharp contrast to the secular ambience of Benjamin’s childhood, Krleža’s childhood is dominated by church scenography. Next to the difference between the Protestant and Catholic Empires, and the secular Jewishness of Benjamin’s family, this has to be ascribed to the relegation of a strong religious education to the imperial borderlands.

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in which people love to wallow (70–71)—a typical “gay apocalypse” (Broch, Hofmannsthal und seine Zeit 44–48)—but which he was instead determined to counteract by a rebellion of a healthy barbaric blood (68–69). In this regard, he recognizes an elective affinity with St Augustine (57–71), who for his part lived through the transition from a glamourous but corrupt Hellenic society into a poor but blessed age of Christianity (59–64).17 In the same way that the adult St Augustine, in his endeavor to deactivate his infantile fascination with the Greek theatre, uncovered its barbaric roots, the narrator in his attempt to disengage his boyish fascination with the church ceremonies, dismantles their pagan origins (68–69). Both envisage the future of human civilization by attaching themselves to that which they understand as its ‘prehistory.’ Or, to put it differently, Krleža engages St Augustin’s attachment to the ‘prehistorical’ in order to legitimize his own. This peculiar technique of self-exemption from the old into the new that in its turn proves to be older than this old—a “revival of the surmounted mode of thinking,” which Freud associated with the “uncanny” (“Das Unheimliche” 232)—finds its further corroboration in the narrator’s attitude to the transitional linguistic situation of his childhood. Krleža composes his work at the time of the Ustasha regime that tried to institute the Croatian state, among the other ‘pillars’, on the “caricatures of resurrected linguistic coinages” (Djetinjstvo 1972 83).18 By drawing a parallel with the time of his childhood, the “decade of the emergence of (Croatian) language” (83), the narrator claims that the Štokavian idiom as (re)introduced by the representatives of the Illyrian National Revival in the 1840s began to establish itself at the turn of the century at the expense of his grandmother’s well-rooted Kajkavian idiom (79–88). His point is that the instituted urban idiom in 1942 has to be saved from the Ustashas’ artificial language in the same way that the established Kajkavian idiom of his boyhood had to be saved from the linguistic chaos that the Illyrian reforms and the following political developments had introduced (79–80). In both cases he

17  This elective affinity manifests itself in a characteristically chiastic relationship. In the same way that St Augustin transgresses from the Greek-Roman into the Christian civilization, Krleža in his thirteenth year (1904) takes the opposite direction: he abandons Christianity by switching to the Greek-Roman culture (51–53). Likewise, whereas St Augustine uncovers the theatre as a futile game, Krleža uncovers the hypocrite character of the church ritual that was celebrated by the adult St Augustine as the only truth. 18  The main pillar of this state (of exemption) that was structured on the family model was of course, like in Nazi Germany, the figure of the Führer who set the general law, which he was exempted from.

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advocates, via a historical retour, a self-exemption from the politically consecrated linguistic present. This operation of self-exemption from the present state of exception into its ‘prehistory’ gives rise to the whole project of the childhood’s recollection. Bora Ćosić’s novel Doktor Krleža—“by far the best reading of A Childhood in Agram” (Brlek 169)—states that in this book Krleža wanted “to re-formulate his life in terms of another self that was found on the margins of the one he in fact was” (Ćosić 9). By undertaking such travel into an imagined land beyond history, the narrator claims to be operating on the model of the infantile play, which he interprets as an “exemption” of a “young animal” from “the social mess” that surrounds it (Djetinjstvo 1972 34), a “salutary magic” which the child engages to break free from the “everyday futility” of the adult world (35). Because the book allegedly continues such a revolutionary childish play, it should be read as an act of free spontaneity, a drive that “springs […] like a well from the hill”, or a “process that has its purpose in itself” (35). According to the narrator, this holds for any proper work of art. The question though that should be raised here is whether the supposedly ‘prehistorical’ childish play is not a retroactive historical construct, in the sense in which Novalis states that “[t]he beginning [of the self] emerges later than the self” (Schriften 1 253). Because the self cannot have begun, its ‘free’ beginning might prove to have been therapeutically constructed. This construction is, as we have seen in the example of Benjamin’s Berlin Childhood, adapted to the needs of the present self. In the same way that Benjamin placed his recollections in the year 1900—just before Berlin Jews faced the foreignness of their German home—Krleža places his recollections in the years 1902–03, just before he became a writer (Djetinjstvo 1972 51) and thereby accepted his unhomeliness in the given world. At this very moment, from the present point of view, the continuity with reality was interrupted, childhood became a point of no return, and adulthood in its turn became a permanent state of exception. In 1942, in addition, the fifty-year-old Krleža was disappointed with the fictional zone of self-exemption that he had chosen almost forty years previously, now deciding to exempt himself into a new one. This fictional zone seemed to have ossified, with the time, into a game with prescribed rules, out of which he wanted to escape back into free childish play.19 19  Ian Wierzbicki pointed out that the years of composition of the autobiographic prose (1940–1959) were “the years of Krleža’s complete silence as a creator of literary fiction” (Wierzbicki 48). According to the fictional thesis of Ćosić’s novel Doktor Krleža, in 1942 the writer renounced novel writing because it destroys the singular I and instead chose testimony, which is only able to maintain such an I (Ćosić 62–63, 68, 299, 435, 512, 521).

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Krleža’s intellectual program was therefore, like Benjamin’s after all, preventing any state of exception, including one’s own, from turning into a regular state. Following this guideline, Benjamin proposed to establish “a true (or genuine; wirklich) state of exception” against the “false” state of exception, which the fascists had turned into a regular state (“Über den Begriff der Geschichte” 254–255).20 He called upon all individuals to exempt themselves from the imposed state by opening a self-finding life trajectory, which resists its pre-given rules. Put in the Kantian terms that clearly inspire it, such an identity building avoids a common understanding (Verstand) that binds a given community in favor of a public sense (Vernunft) that pertains to every human being, however different he or she may be (Kant, Critique of Judgment 123, 125). Giorgio Agamben pointed out that Kant’s summoning of audacious individuals to exempt themselves from the imposed communal rules coincided with the first modern political state of exception as introduced by the French Revolution (Agamben, State of Exception 37). Peter Fritzsche convincingly argued that the maneuver of self-exemption was engaged precisely by the individuals whom the French revolutionary state had left stranded. The French Revolution made history into a relentless iteration of the new (Fritzsche 9). However, by obliging every individual to revolutionize himself or herself, i.e. to systematically exempt himself or herself from the reigning prejudgments, Kant involuntarily translated French revolutionary politics from the public into the private sphere. This explains why he was regarded as the philosopher of the French Revolution (Arendt, Lectures 44–45). By stating that “our age is the genuine age of critique to which everything must submit” (Critique of Pure Reason 100–101), he expected each and everybody to deactivate immediate experiential investments of his or her reason, as established by his or her given community, for the benefit of a messianic community-yet-to-come. By doing so, he or she would shape his or her self in the same way that a genius shapes a work of art, i.e. through a consistent self-exemption from the application of any of the given rules (Critique of Judgment 136–137). When they treat the self as a work of art, Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel manifest their loyalty to Kant’s delineated postulates. Such a self is a defense response to the imposed political state of exception, a compensatory maneuver that directs the private operation of self-exemption against the agencies that had introduced it on the public level. Yet exactly because Benjamin calls the private state of exception “true” and the public “false” this opposition must 20  In the same sense Krleža argues against the right to “self-determination of peoples” that is regularly bound to particular territories in the name of a “most elementary right to life of every individual” (Davni dani 1 348) whose “homeland is the globe” (Davni dani 2 322).

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be interrogated. What it misapprehends is that the private self-exemption, while apparently countering the public state of exception, surreptitiously reproduces it. It relies on the same mystification of the evading source of its authority as the political state of exception. Consider that, as Kant emphasizes in his famous definition, the work of art can be only indirectly gathered through its deactivating effects (Critique of Judgment 138–139). The divine force of persistent negation itself eludes to negation. In the same way that Kant makes genius into the “mystic foundation” of the work of art’s authority, Benjamin and Krleža make childhood into the evading source of their narrators’ authority. In both recollections, the childhood becomes a silent ferment that, by the power of its images, subverts rational insights. Here is how A Childhood in Agram begins: Right at the beginning a lot of images. Balls, moonlight, fountains in the shade of a line of trees, cats and pigeons. I watch winged dreams, birds and red balls in a dream, and in the rooms, in which sewing machines buzz, stand headless mannequins without the hands, strangely thin at the waist. Young ladies kneel around these headless statues and, pulling needles out of their mouths, stick them into the deaf and dumb dolls, wrapped in cloth. I watch stars and wax heads, noble gentlemen in the windows (with cylinders and sticks) standing deaf and dumb behind the glass, with the sideburns of hemp and bright pink cheeks of gingerbread babies. Djetinjstvo 1972 11

Already this introductory paragraph gives rise to the opposition that structures the following remembrances: on the one hand the child as a medium of a naturally intact and immediate experience of reality and, on the other, adults as headless mannequins and deaf and dumb puppets in the ready-made social scenarios. Because the boy operates as a passive inscription surface into which most vivid images are engraved—true im-pressions indeed—he does not distinguish the earthly from the heavenly appearances, nor the real ones from the dream ones. He equates the things with the installations, animals and peoples, or the perceptions that were made indoors with those that were made outdoors. His corporeal memory archive absorbs everything simultaneously like a “glass vessel through which numerous lights radiate”, or a “bodily mirror” in which “transparent images vibrate” (11). The narrator obviously longs for this mythic primordial condition of being a mere receptacle for an “elemental vehemence or engram of the excited impression” (13), for “an experience so

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intense and so powerful that it imposes itself by the force of its own combustion, that from this blaze an irrefutable force of ingle outbreaks” (15). He complains that today (1942), at a distance of forty years, only “images of forgotten images of images that we call memories” are available (15), which wear away, erode, dissect and disfigure the past “virginally intact, fresh, primal, infantile, animal, and immediate” reality (13). This disconnection, this cry of liberation from various learned and drilled images, from foreign glasses, magic glasses, scientific binoculars, rational means for the observation of things (a microscope or a telescope or a magnifier), is one of those fundamental questions: how to free oneself from the veils of learned schemes in order to gaze without any mediation? (13) Amidst the Second World War, on the heap of Europe’s ruins (101), the narrator is unfortunately merely confronted with the desperate splinters of the former living memory or, in Benjamin’s famous definition of the aura, the “appearance(s) of the distance, however close it (they) may be” (Benjamin, “Das Kunstwerk” 440). As uncertain and elusive images, these remnants challenge his memory archives. How powerfully their traces will be activated, the narrator states, “depends not only on the force of the impression, but also on the receptive ability of an individual” (Djetinjstvo 1972 15). What these uncanny images ultimately address is an individual’s deeply buried somatic truth, which the narrator clearly privileges over the rational one. Only these images’ sensual impressions are able to pierce through the layers of individual suppression, capturing the truth, in Jakob Bachofen’s words, “at a single stroke without intermediates” (Bachofen 31). The narrator’s conception of sensual impressions is strongly reminiscent not only of Bachofen’s “immediate anamnesis”, which traverses “the path of imagination with the power and rapidity of electricity” (31), but also of Aby Warburg’s penetrating force of images that set free the affective potential of the cultic acts underlying them (Assmann, Erinnerungsräume 227–228). But it finds its most accurate explanation in the following passage from Proust’s Remembrance of the Things Past: The book with the characters that are buried in us, not drawn by ourselves, is our only book. […] Only the impression, however thin its substance seems to be, and however impalpable its traces, is a criterion of truth. Proust 880

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Like Proust’s narrator who browses the ruins of European civilization after the First World War, Krleža’s narrator, who browses them amidst the Second World War suspends the compartmentalized rational truth as a deeply compromised European achievement. He instead returns to the supposedly integral corporeal truth, clandestinely imprinted by nature into infantile bodies in the form of “primordial images”.21 The images that fascinate the boy in A Childhood are primordial indeed, either in the sense of immediately recognizable geometrical figures—balls, bullets, moon, sun, stars, a round female breast or water fountain, the wax heads (11–12), the coins with engraved figures, the circus circle, and the hot air balloon—or in the sense of being puncta, as Barthes called the small details on the photos that instantaneously establish an “umbilical cord” with their observer’s memory traces (Camera Lucida 53). Among the recollected images, for example, the fountain’s splash, the gaslight, the bell’s chiming, the brook’s babble, the cock’s crowing, the candle’s mirror-reflex, and the smell of rubber, chalk and sponge figure as such penetrating puncta (12–15). By following their trace one after another, and ridding himself of “numerous false judgments about the appearances and things” that were meanwhile adopted (12), the narrator ultimately claims to have established an “umbilical cord” with his infantile self: At the end of the road, in a word, I have returned to that which I saw and heard at the beginning when I had not thought and therefore not known anything about that, and thus I have again, by decapitating my knowledge, reduced everything to a naive, childish freshness of the first impression, i.e. moonlight or ball … (12) So this is the narrator’s program: To catapult himself, and thereby his reader, back into the primordial condition of a mere receptacle for the imprint of a reality that is “still not damaged, still not disfigured”, “worn out, truncated” and “shredded” by the “so-called rational dissection” (13). This can be accomplished only by way of “an artistic play with the things and appearances around us” (12) since only such a free play, unlike the prescribed adult games, establishes an “umbilical cord” with the childish play. To be sure, very few individuals feel stimulated to return to their infantile self by unwinding the development that 21   Whereas Benjamin’s enigmatic images are confusing, disfiguring and labyrinthine, Krleža’s primordial images, to put it with Benjamin, display embossed (geprägte) forms as characteristic of the “memories of a childhood spent in the countryside” (Berliner Kindheit 1987 9). I will return to this typically imperial relationship between the center and periphery in the conclusion.

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they have undergone. Most people, in their dealing with the confusing reality, usually deploy ready-made schemes, submitting themselves to the “imperatives called sanctities” and worshipped by the majority of “mankind distorted through the dressage” (23–24). “Ninety-five percent” of mankind, due to its exposition to the “sadistic propaganda” of “wars, bells, gods, countries, nations, military barracks, churches, philosophies” (21), displays a regrettably “manufactured consciousness” (20). The remaining five percent consists of artists: Not submitting to the tyranny of education, more obstinate individuals intrinsically preserve a vivid image of their free childhood that contradicts any discipline: these are the lost, dead, ancient childish inspirations, preserved in the hearts of only those fools whom people used to call poets. (23) These rare artists, by adhering to the infantile play as preserved in their memories, dismantle the adult games as imposed by the states, schools, armies, churches, or circuses with the aim of disciplining the population (21–24). Their mission is to return these stultifying games, which modify living individuals into mechanical puppets, back into the creative condition of childish play. However, considering the mass of narcotized addicts, “the intellectual endeavor of one per mil thinkers to carry out the negation of […] the manufactured consciousness in rational way” is an “ephemeral” “antidote” (20–21). In addition to that, for such a “negation of their surroundings” they “often pay with their own lives” (24). Finally, their effort is enormous because the elevation above the human puppet theatre cannot simply follow the “call of wildness” as the childish play does, but has to confront the intricate laws of words that contain “countless tributaries of different symbols, conventions, contractual signs,” “millennia of human experience and suffering” (25). As soon as the narrator introduces the artistic play into his argumentation, a clear opposition between the adults’ public state of exception—as established by the rigid rules of their games—and the children’s private self-exemption from them by way of their creative plays, proves difficult to maintain. The artistic play is an entirely different and much more demanding undertaking than the infantile play because it knows that it operates within the confusing rules of public games. The artists are aware of the complex and sophisticate field of “represented representations” (predočena predodžba) or “performances of performances” (predstava o predstavi) (26–27) in which they maneuver at a “double distance from that which they want to see” (15). Being firmly entangled in language, they must “express themselves in a very mediate and rational way” (15). “An expression can be a costume as well […], which is most frequently the

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case in the history of literature and painting” (27). This strategic artistic procedure implies a deliberate re-signing of the given signs’ negation of reality, the task of which is to prevent this negation from becoming a new reality. In accordance with Krleža’s aforementioned intellectual program, the given signs’ negation of reality has to be uncovered as a game.22 The narrator describes such a paradoxical introduction of the illusion for the sake of the truth in the following way: A retouch, that is a creative repairing or perfecting of an impression, eliminating or removing of superficial details, peeling or supplementing reality to an appropriately suggestive artistic formula, does not mean transcribing or imitating or copying the original impression. To retouch, this very often means to delete and to reduce a whole range of details of an impression to a formula that is called comprehensive, and exactly this minimum of impression, a shadow of its shadow, speaks often more than the whole complexity of an impression, which is expected to achieve the effect of artistic achievement. All of this carries within it a magnetic force, to express myself in a banal way, of inspiration, and it is never a direct forgery nor a duplicate of a form. (25) Let us now, for the sake of clarity, translate this triad consisting of the artistic play, adult games and the infantile play into the terms of Niklas Luhmann’s theory of “autopoietic systems”, considering that Krleža interprets art in the same early Romanticist tradition as a continuous autopoiesis (or self-creation). Whereas the child is a first-order observer who directly identifies with things without taking any distance from them (14), and the adult is a second-order observer who negates the child’s sensual identification by recognizing the rules that underlie it, the artist is a third-order observer who negates this adult negation in order to reintroduce into it a “minimum of childish impression, a shadow of its shadow”. A work of art could not have become a “suggestive artistic formula” without such a reintroduction of the playful shadow of impression into the given rules of observation. It only becomes able to captivate its observers through such a reanimation, transferring them back into the passive condition of children. By insisting on the aesthetic ability of a work of art to address its observers’ senses (25–35), the narrator of A Childhood continues 22  See the following programmatic statement from the first version of A Childhood, which was dropped from the second: “The negation of something that is negative (game) aims at the game […] that is mistakenly taken not to be a game but reality.” (“Djetinjstvo” 1952 358).

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Krleža’s polemics from the Dialectical Antibarbarus (1939) against the Marxist theory of reflection that was based on rational principles. However, considering the external political circumstances of these polemics, Tomislav Brlek is right in assuming that Krleža’s project of redeeming the individual impression was, like that of Walter Benjamin, simultaneously dismantling the collective rules of the Nazis’ game (Brlek, “Samopisanje” 172). In both these directions, social and national, Krleža wanted to save a “small truth” from being swallowed by the “big, cynical one”.23 His narrator’s conception of art in A Childhood in Agram itself emerges through multiple self-exemptions, as we will come to see in more detail. Yet however small and insignificant it may appear to the one whom it has ‘stamped’, an impression resurfaces, the narrator claims, after the long period of its incubation. It does so in the mediate form of an index, the most complex kind of sign, which he compares, in the realm of nature, to the dawn or dusk, a migration of swallows or a brook’s babbling (27). Because artistic expression is such an index by definition, nobody can pinpoint what it ultimately refers to. Inasmuch as it unleashes unlimited possibilities of interpretation, it resists logical analysis (32). It manifests an author’s intuition and appeals to his or her receiver’s intuition—Krleža deploys Schopenhauer’s notion of “Will” as a synonym for intuition (33)—which is why neither of them can ever really identify that which mobilizes them. As Kant spells out in his Critique of Judgment, although this spiritus movens resides in the realm of a pure assumption, this does not prevent it from apodictically demanding the universal consent of everyone (Critique 26, 44, 47). In such a manner, an impression usurps the status of a verified logical judgment (15–16). Something that has “its origin solely in reflective judgment” (16) and is “a subjective quality” (49) presents itself as if it has its origin in nature and is an objective quality. This is how it hideously disciplines the proclaimed freedom of art. By empowering itself through the disempowerment of all applications of its rule, it surreptitiously transforms artistic play into a game. Evasive as it is, it institutes self-exemption as this game’s rule. Whoever wants to join it, must unreservedly accept this rule (136–137). Both narrator and child in A Childhood in Agram passionately adhere to it. The delineated exemption of impression from observation, play from game, senses from reason, memory from history, image from language, and intuition from logic, ultimately profiles self-exemption as the very principle of this book. This is why, in the conclusion, the boy is celebrated as an epitome of the 23  Brlek refers to the following fragment from Krleža’s diary from 1942, titled “Conversation about the Truth”: “The big, cynical truths eat the small truths” (“Razgovor o istini” 139; Brlek, “Samopisanje” 172).

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illusionist, fraud, charlatan, magician, tumbler, and Judas (103–104). All these coatings and transfigurations, along with those that turn him into the painter (44) and actor (51; 88–89), prefigure his final self-exemption into the role of the writer (51–53), which gives rise to the book itself. The book is accordingly presented as the result of an admirable continuity of one and the same impersonating self from its very beginning to the end. Although somewhat covertly, it charts its own genealogy in a manner that strongly reminds us of Nietzsche’s genealogy of the dispossessed individuals’ surplus of adaptability, which, in its turn, paved the way for his own thinking method (The Joyful Wisdom § 354, 355, 361). It began with the “denigrated and humiliated” mob; continued with the actor who has learned to command his instincts with other instincts; then the “artist” such as the fool or the clown; thereupon, the proper artist; until the process was finally crowned with the “genius”. Nietzsche’s genealogical method, it follows, results from the reorientation of negation from an external target (the “dispossessor”) to the bearer of this operation himself or herself, or the negation’s transformation into the self-negation. Nietzsche interiorizes the opposition and turns it against the self. Consecutively deactivating the deactivation just performed, opposing the opposition—in the same manner that Kant expected the reason of his artistic genius to continuously disengage the automatic application of its habits—his unhomely thought transforms the popular ressentiment directed against the “dispossessor” into an interminable series of self-revolutions. His genealogy turns desperate passivity into the frenetic activity of self-reconfiguration.24 Krleža’s genealogy does the same, leading from a child’s naivety to a writer’s maturity. If the boy unconsciously engages self-exemption to defend himself from the world of adults, the writer deploys it strategically in the shaping of his self. It is not only that, following the principle guideline of individuality “I am what I am not”, he iteratively sees his former self as an alien that he cannot identify with anymore. He also switches between one topic and another as well as back and forth between the historical succession of narrative recollection and the ahistorical simultaneity of essayistic reflection (Brlek, “Samopisanje” 182, 185). As I have tried to argue elsewhere (Biti, Doba svjedočenja 53–97), the commemoration of the lost childhood is only one direction of this subject’s self-exemption; the other is pulling himself out of earthly passions in the impartial ahistorical position ‘above the fray’, characteristic of a “thinker who thinks about certain matters clearly, really and fully logically” (Krleža, Davni dani 1 160). While this direction figures in the later autobiographical prose 24  The above section on Nietzsche draws on a paragraph from my Tracing Global Democracy 231.

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Bygone Days (1956) as an explicit topic, the narrator of A Childhood adopts it merely as one of his operating modes. As soon as one of these two modes— historical recollection and ahistorical reflection—establishes itself as a regulated game, he introduces its playful disfigurement by means of the other. Such a consistent politics of self-exemption did not reach its end once Krleža completed his work. In fact, like Benjamin, he never really brought it to completion but continued to exempt himself from all the shapes it had adopted (Brlek, “Samopisanje” 165–166; 181). Commemoration was for both Krleža and Benjamin constitutively linked with postponement and this, in its turn, with the exemption from unacceptable presents. Despite these writers’ nostalgic proclamations, it was not the pre-historical past that triggered their memories but the historically metamorphosing states of exception. These uncanny, unhomely constellations induced their passionate attachments to dispossession. This means that they make infancy speak with an adopted voice and identify itself with an adopted face, fashioned to compensate for their traumatic presents. Due to this forging of childhood’s voice and face, its unhomeliness is presented as having been strategically chosen. The childhood’s unhomeliness must figure as a deliberate choice of ‘freedom’ against ‘slavery’ in order to establish continuity with the unhomeliness of the dispossessed adults. This continuity authorizes victims to deny the traumatic character of their unhomeliness and present it as a privilege. To help this self-consoling image become self-evident, the modern individual was hard pressed to make all that is close and familiar become distant and strange and to start his or her history always anew. This incredible pressure to self-estrangement still accords in Foucault’s untiring insistence, an individual has to break free from the delusions of the past, to continuously reassess one’s limits and capabilities (“La vie” 1587). Each of us has to surrender to the ethical imperative, which “deprives us of our continuities […] dissipates that temporal identity in which we are pleased to look at ourselves […] bursts open the other, and the outside […] establishes that we are difference, that our reason is the difference of discourses, our history the difference of times, our selves the difference of masks” (The Archeology of Knowledge 131).25 25  Tomislav Brlek’s otherwise attentive, rich and lucid reading of Krleža’s A Childhood takes this imperative for granted by raising it to the status of the distinctive feature of (proper) literature. Following Lada Čale-Feldman (Čale-Feldman 293–296), he criticizes my previous reading of A Childhood (Biti, Doba svjedočenja 57–58)—which was rather cursory given that it was just a small constitutive part of my extensive reading of Bygone Days—as a failed project of the self’s re-establishment. He and Čale-Feldman read A Childhood, on the contrary, as a project of the self’s dissolution in writing (écriture). They treat literature

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Where pressure reigns, there can be no freedom, at least not the unconstrained kind that the narrator of A Childhood is aiming at. On the contrary, the imperative of permanent self-exemption, while it opposes a given state of exception’s autocracy, invisibly resumes its discriminative operations. Engaging an ‘extra-historical’ condition for the sake of alignment of historical injustices proves to be equivocal. Whoever among the humans takes such ‘transcendent paradises’ for the self-evident point of his or her life orientation, he or she acts against the huge mass of fellow beings whose points of departure are firmly entangled in the immediate, everyday human history. As Krleža himself once put it in Bygone Days, “there is a long way” to such extraterritorial and extratemporal oases which forgets that humankind consists of “children, sons, daughters, mothers, grandmothers, wives, in a word families” (Davni dani 1 320). Whereas the passionate attachment to a world-at-infinite-distance encourages some, it simultaneously destroys others.

Two Kinds of Self-exemption from the Frustrating Present

As the composition of their books testifies, Benjamin and Krleža are not addressed by their childhoods in the same way. Benjamin’s selection of Denkbilder is induced by a deeply buried corporeal “memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger” (“Über den Begriff” 253). It consists of a fleeting sequence of instantaneous breakthroughs of the resurrected past’s face and voice into the living subject’s now-time ( Jetztzeit). Being exposed to the past self’s accusing “gaze” from below, the narrator is catapulted out of his privileged historical present and forced into a sudden abridgement of his life as an “invention of always new illusions to prevent any given illusion from becoming true” (Brlek, “Samopisanje” 170), which means as the subject’s endless redoubling or (what I have called) self-exemption. I interpret Brlek’s insistence on the eminently fictional character of literature as a part of his polemics, in this article, against the usual interpretation of A Childhood as Krleža’s confession. But I have reservations about his (and Čale-Feldman’s) passionate effort to turn the fiction into literature’s self-evident and allencompassing rule, a strategy that comes to light in Brlek’s compulsive repetition of the phrases such as “it is by no means accidental”, “it certainly cannot be considered random”, and “it is more than obvious” (167, 175, 178, 181, 184, 190). What this iteration makes evident, is that the rule which Brlek and Čale-Feldman attribute to literature is not at all evident but has to be infiltrated. Instead of taking Krleža’s consistent engagement of self-exemption for granted, I read it as an action of such infiltration. In my view, the researcher’s task is not to enforce the naturalization of the entrenched but unilateral categories, but to analytically disaggregate them.

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history, which in its scattered picture-puzzles condenses and amalgamates this history’s distinct temporal sections. Through such an uncanny fusion of divergent temporalities and their labyrinthine reverberations with one another, the words are forced to meet with the relinquished things, reflections with the despised intuitions, texts with the absolved images, and the mature conceptual resemblances with the infantile sensual ones. In a word, Benjamin makes the childhood operate as a horizon that enjoys an unquestioned state of exception like Absent God in negative theology. According to Derrida, “negative theology consists in regarding every predicate […] as inadequate to the essence […] of God”; “only a negative […] attribution can claim to approach God”. “God’s name would fit everything that cannot be […] designated, except in an indirect and negative way. (“How to Avoid” 146) He manifests Himself through a mimicry of His “most fleeting and refined substances” (Benjamin, “Doctrine” 68), which reveal themselves “to the eye as fleetingly and transitorily as a constellation of stars” (66). At permanent pains to translate this untranslatability, Benjamin’s Denkbilder do not communicate but reveal (i.e. unconsciously mime or act out) the childhood, raising consciousness of the manner in which the languages of man haphazardly reveal (offenbaren) the relinquished divine language (“Über Sprache überhaupt”). Like the translator from his famous essay, they accept the task of evoking in the mode of communication genuine to human tongues the mode of revelation genuine to this primordial language (“The Task” 76). Insisting on the “untranslatability” of the mode of revelation into the mode of communication (82), Benjamin might have been evoking the untranslatability of the Jewishness in the European context. In order to protect this imperiled entity, he confers upon the mode of revelation an unquestioned state of exception. Europe does translate the Jews in its national and international registers but—this is how I propose to read Benjamin—they prove to be untranslatable due to the “all too great fleetingness with which meaning attaches to them” (“The Task” 82, trans. modified, allzu großer Flüchtigkeit, mit welcher der Sinn an ihnen haftet, “Die Aufgabe” 61). If we engage the complex argument as developed by Benjamin in this essay, we could infer that the Jewishness goes far beyond any object of identification (das Gemeinte) due to the rich and mobile mode of intention (die Art des Meinens) that inheres in its memory archive (“Die Aufgabe” 54–55). It has been built “in a constant state of flux” and through a continuous mixing with the diverse European national cultures (“The Task” 78). Such an elusive mode of intention, which has “a history of its own, and is not merely the setting for history” (76), is the “element that does not lend itself to translation” (79), the one of “a transformation and a renewal” that not only has to be carefully preserved but brought to “abundant flowering” (77).

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This is how Benjamin envisions the mission of the suddenly ‘exteriorized’ European Jews. They ought to operate as a resurfacing subversive ferment in the community of nations, to create a room for maneuvering in its very interior in order to prevent its approaching catastrophe. Krleža’s endangerment was of a different kind since in the Independent State of Croatia in 1942 Croats were certainly not marked for extermination. Even though the Ustashas were not necessarily merciful with their internal enemies, at the time they had a more urgent agenda to follow. That which was really imperiled were Krleža’s longterm sovereignty projects, which oscillated between the Croatian national and Marxist social platforms of unification, both established against the hegemons’ resp. exploiters.26 The Croatian national autonomy, which he longed for since the Dual Monarchy’s time, presented itself now in a terribly distorted Nazi form. The Marxist platform of social justice, which he was advocating against the Yugoslav social and economic misbalances, had in the meantime degenerated in political practice into a pernicious doctrine. In the exterminations of the Second World War, post-imperial Europe experienced the terrible outcome of its interwar ideological wars. This is why Krleža drops the salvation of the Croats or, for that matter, the “wretched on the earth” in favor of the salvation of individuality. Unlike the first two projects, which direct their negation against the external others, the salvation of individuality turns it against the internal ones, i.e. against the alienation of oneself. The rage against the oppressors thus translates into an interminable series of self-revolutions. At the time of the Second World War, Krleža’s failed interwar attempts to awaken the desperately passive masses of his compatriots or the dispossessed strata turn into a frenetic individual activity of self-reconfiguration. Yet even though anarchist negation changes its direction by taking the self as its new target, it does not diminish its radicalness. Krleža is a declared adherent of Max Stirner’s uncompromised negation of Fichte’s absolute I. Whereas for Fichte the I (das Ich) is everything, for Stirner (and Krleža) the I is Nothing, which tirelessly destroys everything including itself (Stirner 80–83). The book of aphorisms embedded in the first book of Krleža’s Bygone Days (Davni dani 1 168–195) emerges to confirm Stirner’s anarchist-individualist enrooting of the self in the Nothing. This explains the composition of A Childhood, which consistently oscillates between the images which precede the articulation of the self’s history and the reflections, which come as it were from beyond it. As soon as the narrator realizes his stake in the shaping of the child’s images, he returns to his reflective position—which, in a sharp contrast to Benjamin’s Berlin Childhood, occupies 26  See Chapter Three.

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two third of this book27—but, as soon as he takes it back into his possession, he experiences a subversive reappearance of sensual images within it. Instead of subversively enmeshing these extremes into the labyrinths of history like Benjamin, Krleža switches back and forth between them by searching for an exit from history, in the same way as he did, during the interwar period, between the national and social platform. In contrast to Benjamin who longs for the state of exemption’s zone of indistinction, he persistently longs for the state of exception’s zone of distinction. This explains why Benjamin, entrapped in a state of exception, conceives individuality in the weak messianic manner as an enduringly subversive ferment at the heart of history, whereas Krleža conceives it in the strong messianic manner as the carrier of a final liberation from history. He was an intellectual of the (post-)imperial borderland that is by definition situated in an enduring zone of indistinction. The hidden co-implication of the state of exemption and state of exception made the gap between the imperial center and peripheries persevere. Their dis/juncted projects of individuality have haunted and fostered one another, reproducing post-imperial Europe’s asymmetry up until today.

27  In the final version of his manuscript, Benjamin significantly took care to eliminate as many narrator’s comments as possible. The prevalence of the narrator’s perspective in Krleža’s work underlines its educational profile that is, as we have seen, based on the pattern of the Künstlerroman, a modernist offspring of the educational novel. This retroactive taming of narrative fiction does not escape Bora Ćosić, who subtitles his re-writing of A Childhood in Agram “An educational novel” (Ćosić, Doktor Krleža), but is neglected by both Brlek and Čale Feldman, who insist on A Childhood’s untameable fictionality.

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Index Adler, Viktor 185 Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund 248 Agamben, Giorgio 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 19, 42, 65, 96, 137, 165, 229, 254, 263, 277 Alexander, Jeffrey 4, 16, 116, 159, 277, 292 Althusser, Louis 14, 277 Amselle, Jean-Loup 147, 277 Anderson, Benedict 3, 70, 157, 246, 256, 277 Andrić, Ivo: “Anika’s Times” (Anikina vremena) 180, 181, 196, 277, 289; Bosnian Chronicle (Travnička hronika) 161, 174, 175, 178, 181, 216, 277; “Love in the Kasaba” (Ljubav u kasabi) 197; On the Sunnyside (Na sunčanoj strani) 180; Signs by the Roadside (Znakovi pored puta) 162, 175; The Bridge over the Drina (Na Drini ćuprija) 7, 160, 161, 162, 163, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 178, 179, 180, 181, 277; The Damned Yard (Prokleta avlija) 170; The Woman from Sarajevo (Gospođica) 178, 180 Antisemitism See Jewishness Aping See Redoubling Appadurai, Arjun 3, 164, 197, 218, 277 Apter, Emily 11, 16, 18, 19, 28, 60, 278 Arendt, Hannah 4, 34, 37, 38, 42, 115, 118, 185, 211, 263, 278 Arens, Katherine 158, 278 Assmann, Aleida 66, 239, 240, 241, 265, 278 Assmann, Jan 241 Atatürk, Kemal Pasha 60 Attachment: passionate, emotional (adherence) 4, 6, 28, 57, 174, 182, 272; readership’s 183; sacrificial 3; to a world-at-infinite-distance 272; to ancestors 7, 35, 126; to an “indeterminable attribute” (Musil) 94; to artistic play 267, 268; to grandfathers against fathers 75, 207; to historically ‘antiquated’ epochs and techniques 60, 159, 211; to humiliation 37; to nonbelonging and homelessness 57; to nothingness (das Nichts, Nietzsche) 94, 95, 117, 226; to possession vs. dispossession 43; to solitude 72, 73, 214; to the clan 74, 75, 76, 77, 78; to the

disregarded victims 165, 232; to the homeland 95, 99, 114, 166, 167; to the horizon of universal human reconciliation (Andrić, Hofmannsthal, Bakhtin) 174; to the imagined community 39, 41, 43, 96, 138, 158, 182; to the Impersonal Common Father (Emperor) 204; to the past 8, 12, 125, 168, 238, 254, 256, 272; to the present 8, 125, 168; to the province/ palanka 66, 68, 72, 73, 74, 79, 89; to the tribe 77, 79, 249; to un je ne sais quoi ou un je ne sais qui, Blanchot 96; to wounds 46; vs. affiliation 13, 18, 28, 40, 139, 166, 167, 168 Augustine, Aurelius See Saint Augustine Ausenda, Giorgio 33, 278 Austerlitz, Battle of 148 Austria: First Republic; Ostmark; Second Republic; Ständestaat 98, 106 Austrian Empire See Habsburg Empire Austrian(s) 24, 25, 26, 39, 40, 45, 57, 112, 119, 139, 140, 143, 146, 148, 161, 164, 168, 171, 173, 174, 185, 192, 195, 197, 201, 208, 212, 258 Austro-Hungarian Empire See Dual Monarchy Austro-Slavism 147 Bach, Alexander von 139 Bachofen, Johann Jakob 265, 278 Bahr, Hermann 24, 100, 167, 278 Bakhtin, Mikhail 22, 23, 44, 76, 77, 100, 144, 165, 167, 168, 175, 176, 180, 226, 229, 278, 279 Bakić-Hayden, Milica 116, 174, 278 Balibar, Étienne 174, 279 Balkan War, Second 258 Bandić, Dušan 75, 279 Barkey, Karen 38, 53, 60, 62, 69, 127, 144, 158, 194, 198, 279, 283, 287, 289, 292 Barthes, Roland 254, 266, 279 Bartov, Omer 62, 63, 89, 216, 279, 282, 288, 294, 295, 296 Baudelaire, Charles 7, 9, 10, 80, 81, 126, 251, 280 Bauman, Zygmunt 218, 225, 279

298 Baycroft, Timothy 171, 279, 283, 296 Beck, Ulrich 30, 122 Beckett, Samuel 215, 227 Beebee, Thomas 3, 279 Belgrade 7, 28, 60, 109, 159, 216, 217, 220, 222, 224, 226, 231 Beller, Stephen 23, 58, 127, 128, 145, 146, 148, 149, 168, 184, 185, 186, 192, 243, 244, 279 Belonging: coexisting loyalties 80, 84, 89, 157; distanced (internal exteriority) 184, 243; ‘double consciousness’ (Du Bois)  40, 53, 166, 167, 177, 179; ethnic, onenational b. 157, 158, 160; exempt from b. 28, 30, 31, 157, 167, 186, 187; ‘genuine’ (non-borrowed) 184; hybrid (AustrianJewish, Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian, German-Jewish, German-Moravian, German-Silesian, Hungarian-Jewish, Lithuanian-Russian, Ukrainian-Jewish)  38, 153, 167, 168, 185, 206, 210, 211, 234; imperative of b. 30, 157; in-between the affiliation (to a state) and affinity/ attachment (to a homeland/religion)  18, 28, 166, 167; multiple 30, 157; non-belonging 30, 122, 124, 207; vs. longing (unmooring of determinate belonging) 32, 68, 166, 202, 238, 239, 252, 256 Bendix, Regina 159, 279 Benedikt, Heinrich 154, 279 Benjamin, Walter: Berliner Kindheit um 1900 (Berlin Childhood) 8, 235, 244, 245, 246, 247, 248, 251, 252, 253, 254, 255, 256, 266, 279, 280; “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit” 280; “Der Begriff der Kunstkritik in der deutschen Romantik” 10, 126, 280; “Der Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels” (On the Origin of German Tragic Drama) 9, 10, 237, 252, 280; “ Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers” (The Task of the Translator) 8, 280; “Erfahrung und Armut” 21, 280; “Goethes Wahlverwandschaften” 10, 237; “Karl Kraus” 187, 189, 280; „Lehre vom Ähnlichen“ (Doctrine of the Similar) 280; “Über das

INDEX mimetische Vermögen” 250, 280; “Über das Programm der kommenden Philosophie” (On the Program of Coming Philosophy) 251, 280; “Über den Begriff der Geschichte” (Theses on the Philosophy of History) 22, 165, 175, 260, 263, 280; “Über einige Motive bei Baudelaire” 9, 10, 126, 280; “Über Sprache überhaupt und über die Sprache des Menschen” (On Language As Such and on the Language of Man) 251, 273, 281; “Zentralpark” 237, 251, 252, 253, 281; “Zur Kritik der Gewalt” (Toward a Critique of Violence) 4, 42, 254, 281 Berend, Iván 5, 41, 86, 97, 103, 107, 108, 111, 119, 195, 199, 281 Berlant, Lauren 21, 46, 117, 182, 281 Berlin 2, 5, 32, 211, 239, 241, 243, 244, 245, 247, 249, 250, 251, 253, 254, 256, 257, 262, 274, 278, 281, 284, 287, 288, 292, 293, 296 Bernstein, Michael André 281 Bhabha, Homi 18, 164, 166, 192, 226, 227, 281 Bismarck, Otto von 242 Biti, Vladimir 1, 146, 153, 154, 235, 270, 271 Blanchot, Maurice 96, 100, 215, 219, 229, 230, 231, 232, 281, 285, 286, 295 Bloch, Ernst 248 Bodin, King 102 Boer War, Second 244 Bogdanović, Milan 67, 281 Bogomils 49, 100, 108, 118 Bohemian(s) 202, 203; See Czech(s) Bolshevism 108, 113, 115, 120 Borch-Jakobsen, Mikkel 3 Borderland/frontier See History, Imperial, Indistinction Bosnia and Herzegovina/Bosnian 40, 49, 100, 118, 157, 159, 160, 162, 166, 174, 178, 179, 196, 197, 207, 217, 220 Bosniak(s) 40 Bourget, Paul 81, 281 Branimir, King 102 British Empire 185, 295 Brlek, Tomislav 82, 262, 269, 270, 271, 272, 275, 282 Broch, Hermann 97, 120, 127, 128, 146, 148, 184, 190, 198, 234, 261, 282

INDEX Bronsen, David 200, 282 Brubaker, Rogers 4, 38, 39, 112, 113, 166, 170, 195, 242, 282 Brunner, José 116, 282 Bürger, Peter 191, 215, 225, 282 Burkhart, Dagmar 151, 154, 282 Butler, Judith 12 Byron, George Gordon, Lord 26, 139 Byzantium 33, 34, 43, 105, 107 Calhoun, Craig 112 Carnival: bloody 181, 190, 191; collective body of c. (Stanković) 76, 77; community 132, 141; drawing the audience into the participation, involvement, complicity, co-responsibility, ‘repulsive compassion’ (Kraus) 152, 189, 190, 213, 223; fateful, melancholic, longterm, divine, medieval (Hofmannsthal, Crnjanski) 30, 125, 129, 131, 136, 163, 184, 191; ‘gay apocalypse’ (Broch) 136, 184, 190, 198, 261; impersonating/crawling into other identities (Nietzsche, Weininger, Kraus) 186, 187; jovial, playful, shortterm, human, modern (Hofmannstahl, Crnjanski) 26, 27, 30, 129, 130, 135, 140, 178; licentiousness and debauchery (Stanković) 76; medieval festivities 5, 30, 42, 43, 44, 75, 102, 104, 107, 123, 124, 127, 129, 130, 132, 163, 217, 218, 225; mundus inversus 155; of the multiplied self 60; of the peasants’ orgies (Stanković) 77; of the self 186; theatrum mundi (Hofmannsthal, Crnjanski, Kraus) 124, 132, 190, 191; traits 76; unleashed passions (Kraus) 190; women (Stanković) 76; world (Kraus) 140 Catholic/ism 5, 40, 106, 107, 110, 118, 127, 130, 146, 171, 185, 196, 260 Cavarero, Adriana 211 Césaire, Aimé 217, 218, 282 Chekhov, Anton 131 Childs, Peter 82 Christian/ity 34, 35, 41, 75, 118, 141, 218, 242, 260, 261, 289 Cohen, Gary 80 Columbus, Christopher 49, 109

299 Comedy: baroque vs. modern 122, 123, 124, 129, 130, 131, 132, 190, 191, 211; ‘comedian chance’ (Crnjanski) 163; commedia dell’ arte 130, 131, 139, 154; commedia humana 191; melancholic (lyric/poetic) vs. jovial (light-minded) 30 Community: all-embracing human 156; alternative 135; autological vs. genealogical (Povinelli) 36; coming (Agamben) 229, 263; countercommunity 240, 257; defined by a common commitment to peace 184; defined by common laws, borders and dynasty 183; defined by ‘unity in diversity’ 147, 153, 184; dispersed 240; ecstatic 27, 138; everlasting folk 144; extraterritorial, extratemporal (non-time and non-space) 7, 18, 123, 124, 130, 137, 152, 272; imagined (Anderson) 21, 197; medieval 123; messianic vs. geopolitical 229, 257, 263; moral 4, 6; multiethnic 89, 183; mystic/mythic 126, 172; national vs. social 227; ‘oceanic feeling’ of commonality 27, 124, 126, 138, 140; of fate (Schicksalsgemeinschaft) 39, 43; of outsiders and dissidents 96; of the dispossessed 130; of the weak 25, 126, 132, 134, 135, 138, 141, 148; of victims 30, 122; organic/natural/palanka 58, 68, 124, 151, 152, 155; peripheral/provincial 29, 62; restricted national (Serbian) 227; rules of c. 194, 263; sacrificial/ecstatic/ of victims 25, 30, 130, 148; stranded in c. 243; theatrum mundi’s c. 132; timeless and placeless 143, 228; traumatic reconfiguration of the c. 126; vs. society 144; Yugoslav 170, 227 Connolly, William 35 Connor, Steven 90 Conrad, Joseph 82, 162, 218 Cornwall, Mark 63, 171, 195, 198, 283 Cosmopolitanism: assimilative 26, 38, 139, 235; Greek 14; imperial 142; indifferent 57; Jewish 242; modern 35; paternal 171, 172; regenerative 24; Roman 34

300 Crnjanski, Miloš: Dnevnik o Čarnojeviću (The Dairy about Čarnojević) 44, 49, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58; Itaka i komentari (Commentaries to Ithaca). 45, 58, 136, 283; Lirika Itake (The Lyrics of Ithaca) 41, 42, 48, 54, 127; “Ljubav u Toskani” (Love in Tuscany) 59, 283; Maska (The Mask) 26, 27, 122, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 283, 285, 292, 293, 296; “Objašnjenje Sumatre” (Explanation to ‘Sumatra’) 27, 128, 137, 138, 283; Priče o muškom (Stories about Manly Affairs) 42, 127, 283; Seobe 1 (Migrations 1) 41, 45, 283, 292; Seobe 2 (Migrations 2) 136; “Suzni krokodil” (The Lacrimal Crocodile) 52 Croatia, Croats 20, 26, 29, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 54, 55, 57, 61, 62, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 107, 108, 109, 110, 112, 113, 115, 117, 118, 151, 154, 155, 157, 159, 168, 174, 196, 208, 212, 217, 257, 258, 259, 274; Independent State of Croatia (Ustasha regime) 217, 258, 259, 261; Kingdom of Croatia and Slavonia 61 Croatian Spring 259 Czech(s) 63, 148, 192, 196, 197, 206, 207, 208, 212 See Bohemians Čale-Feldman, Lada 271, 272, 275, 283 Čarnojević, Arsenije 56 Ćosić, Bora 215, 216, 224, 227, 231, 232, 262, 275, 283 D’Annunzio, Gabriele 106, 187 Daničić, Đura 27, 135, 136, 139, 140 Das, Veena 1, 21 De Man, Paul 4, 238, 255, 256, 283, 284 Déak, Istvan 60 Deleuze, Gilles 2, 283 Deretić, Jovan 157, 215 Derrida, Jacques 6, 18, 42, 55, 126, 153, 216, 217, 218, 219, 237, 238, 253, 273, 284, 291 Descartes, René 215, 224, 228 Diderot, Denis 100 Disjunctive conjunction: 14, 15, 216; germane of traumatic constellations 16, 19, 169; of fictional and factual registers 216; of life stages 219; of public and private temporalities 219; of self-reference and hetero-reference 225; of the

INDEX father and son 222, 228; of the regular state and state of exception 18, 169, 263; of the text’s own body and foreign bodies 225; post-avant-garde poetics of (supplementing, grafting, framing, Derrida) 217, 221, 225, 229, 232, 234; of the represented situation and the situation of representation 221 Dispossession: Austrian-Jewish writers’  184; by modernity/modernization 1, 2, 3, 4, 82, 152, 164, 209, 218, 225; defacement 238, 256; economic 182; empowerment through d. (messianic powerlessness) 95; experience of 43, 182, 258; extreme, utter, radical, ‘getting rid of everything’ 46, 78, 94, 113; feeling of 109, 174; history of 110, 115; ideological 182; narratives of 40, 58, 116; national 29, 41, 110, 115; of affective investments (Andrić) 167; of all earthly loyalties 95; of anchorage 81, 228; of childhood 239, 256; of community 113, 240; of defacement 238; of dignity 77; of ‘female flesh’ (Andrić, Musil) 196; of homeland, triple (Mahler) 148; of identity properties, qualities, attributes that results in the self ‘beyond itself’, ‘soul’ (Hofmannsthal), ‘man without qualities’, (Musil); je ne sais quoi, (Lacan/ Foucault), an ‘almost the same but not quite’ element (Bhabha) 8, 23, 80, 88, 89, 96, 123, 192, 207; of individuality 74; of local/earthly dependencies 93; of originals by their reverse side 90; of peripheries 29, 47, 60, 92; of the author 3, 71, 78; of the community 228; of the distinctions between arts, genres, and media 59, 97, 116, 187; of the divine protection 218, 231; of the family 13; of the past 125; of the people, population, subordinates, lower social strata 29, 41, 46, 73, 119, 166, 192, 207, 229, 232, 233; political 105, 116; proletarian 41, 113; religious 5; source of pride, pleasure, empowerment, superiority, enthusiasm, hope for the final salvation/ redemption 46, 114, 116, 147, 182; through foreign rulers/oppressors 105;

301

INDEX through the subordination, oppression and exploitation 29, 34, 42, 50, 54, 86, 105, 109, 110, 147, 164, 199; to an ‘almost the same but not quite’ element (Bhabha) 192; tradition of d. 50; vs. possession 43, 190 Donia, Robert 118, 159, 284 Doré, Gustave 246 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 44, 100, 216 Du Bois, William E.B. 40, 53, 166, 284 Dual Monarchy 31, 45, 60, 61, 63, 79, 86, 98, 103, 142, 149, 157, 183, 194, 199, 202, 204, 205, 208, 212, 233, 257, 258, 259, 274 Dubarry, Jeanne Bécu 139 Dučić, Jovan 43, 47 Düllo, Thomas 149, 163 Đurčić, Milan 43 Đuričković, Dejan 157, 284 Dutch Empire 35 East Central Europe/an 5, 20, 22, 29, 30, 31, 35, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 46, 51, 53, 54, 58, 69, 86, 98, 112, 113, 114, 138, 144, 158, 167, 182, 186, 199 Echoing See Redoubling Eichmann trial 217 Elective affinities (Wahlverwandtschaften): affiliative structures 11; correspondences, concordances, resemblances, identifications 227, 250, 258; cross-referential acts of empathy and solidarity 11; “global family” 226, 228; non-time and non-space of e.a. 126; resemblance (sensuous, pre-modern) vs. similitude (conceptual, modern) 8, 250, 252; self-empowering 147; “terrible kinship” 219, 228; transferential dynamic 12; universal, boundless brotherhood 226, 228; with forerunners and contemporaries 172 Empirico-transcendental doublet (Foucault) See Modernity; Redoubling Engels, Friedrich 24, 65, 147, 152 Eötvös, József von 158 Erasmus of Rotterdam 49, 109 Esposito, Roberto 36, 65, 284 Ette, Ottmar 11, 223, 284

Eugen of Savoy, Prince 24, 146 Evans, Robert John Weston 197 Fanon, Frantz 117, 234, 284 Febvre, Lucien 4, 285 Felman, Shoshana 133, 285 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 235, 274 Fine, John Van Antwerp, Jr. 118 First World War 4, 5, 10, 20, 21, 27, 43, 45, 51, 62, 63, 102, 103, 105, 114, 123, 126, 127, 128, 129, 138, 141, 142, 185, 190, 199, 211, 213, 236, 237, 240, 241, 242, 258, 266, 289 Foteva, Ana 118, 132, 158, 159, 160, 166, 169, 170, 190, 201, 285 Foucault, Michel 82, 87, 96, 100, 137, 153, 157, 161, 197, 230, 231, 271, 281, 285 Frajnd, Marta 123, 135, 136, 139, 285 Francis I, Emperor 184 Francis II, Emperor 145 Frankopan, Fran Krsto 54, 161, 258 Franz Ferdinand 44 Franz Joseph, Emperor 200, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 206, 208, 210 French Empire 148 Freud, Sigmund 7, 8, 9, 11, 12, 75, 77, 124, 125, 134, 138, 146, 152, 236, 237, 238, 250, 261, 285 Friedjung Trial 99 Friedrich Wilhelm III, Emperor 245 Fritzsche, Peter 5, 6, 30, 65, 122, 125, 138, 148, 155, 236, 239, 240, 256, 257, 263, 285 Fuss, Diana 3, 233, 285 Gaj, Ljudevit 49, 104, 118 Gautier, Théophile 139 Gellner, Ernest 97, 98, 199, 286 German Empire: Holy Roman Empire of German Nation 145, 184, 235; Prussia 183; Second German Empire 4; Third Reich 98 German(y) 5, 20, 21, 24, 39, 40, 103, 143, 147, 149, 168, 171, 184, 241, 242, 258, 261, 282, 286, 295; Weimar Republic 241, 242, 244, 245, 286; Wilhelmine G. 242, 258 Gide, André 106 Gilroy, Paul 3, 155, 166, 286 Gligorić, Velibor 67, 286

302 Globalization: involuntary, spontaneous, from below, post-colonial 1, 9, 10, 11, 174; voluntary, systematic, from above, colonial 9, 11, 20, 162; vs. worlding 3, 209 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 139, 188, 190, 236, 237, 252, 253 Great War See First World War Greek(s) 4, 34, 35, 57, 89, 72, 225, 239, 261 Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm 155 Guattari, Félix 2, 283 Gubec, Matija 49, 105 Guha, Ranajit 59, 169, 286 Gumz, Jonathan E. 45 Gypsies 37, 89, 151 Haase, Ulrich 230, 286 Habsburg Empire 31, 37, 38, 39, 41, 60, 121, 127, 147, 148, 150, 153, 161, 166, 168, 170, 183, 193, 195, 198, 202, 214, 283, 288 Haeckel, Ernst 260 Hagen, Mark van 53, 62, 69, 144, 158, 279, 283, 287, 289, 292 Halbwachs, Maurice 64, 65, 89, 286, 292 Hának, Péter 103, 116 Hanson, Stephen E. 5, 39, 112, 168, 172, 182, 286 Harambašić, August 49, 118 Hardt, Michael 33, 277, 286 Hartman, Geoffrey 246, 286 Haslinger, Peter 63, 286 Herder, Johann Gottfried 24, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 59, 65, 111, 116, 147, 205, 286 Hewitson, Mark 171, 279, 283, 296 Hirsch, Marianne 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 238, 239, 241, 254, 256, 286 History: abandonment by h. 66; absolute present beyond the time 228; advantage/privilege of a later position or retroactive insight: observer vs. protagonist 268; between déjà vu and après coup 85; bifurcating temporalities 221; blurred internal differences 29; challenge of the age, moment, present 48, 100; chronic as a bystander of h. 165; composite, dynamically interrelated 12; devastating progress of human h.  144; divine providence vs. contingent

INDEX set of circumstances 190; errancies, aberrancies, misguidances of 219; exclusion from 66; exit or exemption from h. 32, 275; expropriating appropriation through h. 169; external gaze/perspective 64; extraterritorial and extratemporal nowtime (Jetztzeit, Benjamin) 272; family h. 89; fate, fatalism of h. 163, 211; foreshadowing vs. back-shadowing vs. sideshadowing 223; from below 43; grand/great h. 66, 169, 240; hate/revolt against 105; historicism 101; hurts (Jameson) 236; imagined land beyond h. 262; immemorial prehistory 9; kaleidoscope of h. 253; metamorphosing present connected with an extemporal horizon 236; labyrinthine 252; liminal, translation zones, shatterzones, states of exception 29, 61, 62; national 110, 127; non-time and non-space 7; of dispossession 110, 115; of violence 12; oral vs. written 66; past-present-future ‘out of joint’, disjunction, incongruity and incommensurability 14, 219, 226; ‘peoples without’ 24, 147; pluralization, diversification of h. 66; post-h. 228; preh. as a retroactive construct 77; provincial frustration with h. 46; resistance to h. 13; revenge against h. 77; reversed processing of h. (back-folding or unfolding) 248; rule of chance 149; sharing with the past vs. communicating it (Mitteilbarkeit, Benjamin) 17; simultaneity of the non-simultaneous 260; stepping outside, pausing, recollecting 123; transhistorical time 133; tyranny over h. 219; uncritically back-projected 7, 42, 64, 89, 102, 127; unpredictable network of forces 128; vs. ‘great time’ (Bakhtin) 226; vs. memory 66; whimsical mechanism of h. 163; world h. vs. ‘prose of the w.’ (Hegel) 245 Hitler, Adolf 21, 149, 241 Hobsbawm, Eric J. 104, 125, 225, 236, 287 Hofmann, Michael 200, 201, 202, 294 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von: Arabella 5, 25, 26, 30, 122, 123, 129, 131, 134, 135, 140, 141,

INDEX 143, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 198, 211, 282, 287, 294; “Das Gespräch in Saleh” 287; “Das Schrifttum als geistiger Raum der Nation” (The Letters as the Spiritual Space of the Nation) 142, 287; “Der Brief des Lord Chandos” 287; “Die ägyptische Helena” 287; “Die Idee Europa” 25, 126, 147, 287; “Die österreichische Idee” 24, 143, 174, 287; “Österreich im Spiegel seiner Dichtung” (Austria in the Mirror of Its Literature) 142, 288; Rosenkavalier 57, 122, 133, 134, 150, 154, 196, 288; “The Noble Knight Prince Eugene” 146; “Wert und Ehre deutscher Sprache” (The Value and Honor of the German Language) 143, 288; “Wir Österreicher und Deutschland” 288 Hondius, Frits W. 38, 288 Hroch, Miroslav 92, 93, 288 Hugo, Victor 139, 145 Hungary (Hungarian, Magyar) 20, 24, 26, 28, 42, 44, 50, 51, 60, 61, 63, 100, 103, 110, 113, 114, 116, 117, 127, 146, 147, 152, 158, 166, 185, 195, 198, 203, 257, 258, 284, 286, 289 Identification: narrative preventing of i.  14; of oneself as the familiar other (appropriative relation, self-assertion) 3, 14, 15, 16, 19, 142, 236; with a distant other or at-a-distance (non-appropriative relation, self-exemption) 3, 4, 24; with nothingness (Nietzsche, Kamov) 94, 95 Imitation See Redoubling Imperial: assimilation 35, 60, 127, 145, 146, 147, 157, 170, 185, 186, 192; asymmetry between the centers and margins 38, 127, 132, 140, 160, 167, 194, 257, 275; attachment to family bonds (by local imperial servants) 202; ‘barbarians’ or wild(wo)men 24, 33, 59, 147, 206; carriers 33; center, core, metropole 32, 40, 127, 141, 153, 193, 197, 198, 275; civilizing, disciplining 24, 34, 35, 147, 153, 162, 184, 267; coexistence of the dislocated and located 39; detachment, distance of the epic narrator from the characters (Andrić, Roth) 93, 211, 233; detachment

303 from family bonds (by dislocated imperial officers) 202; discrimination 19, 25, 28, 34, 37, 142, 148, 168, 174, 187, 195, 229; disintegration, dissolution, ruination, collapse, breakdown, catastrophe, termination, end time, dying 25, 64, 68, 81, 98, 131, 147, 186, 205, 233; disrespect, despise for provincial subordinates, women, workers, nations and locations 42, 89, 139, 181, 204; distancing, alienating, depersonalizing external and internal others 59, 274; divided belonging 167; ‘ecological arrangement’ (allocating everyone his/her proper place, Gilroy) 155; Europe 7, 8, 5, 20, 22, 28, 69, 75, 152, 157, 169, 243, 260, 274, 275, 289; family model (Habsburg) 38; fin de siècle 97, 124, 130; homogenization through shared heritage 158; in-between the empire and nation-state 31; ‘indigenization’, nationalizing 38; linguistic homogenization, standardization, unification (Germanization, Russification, Ekavization) vs. compartmentalization 108, 170, 195, 197; meandering identity politics 31; mixture of ethnic and civic nationalism 61; narratives vs. local myths 169; past 28, 36; patrons and patronized: internally divided and interchangeable 16, 118, 198, 199; periphery, borderland, margin, frontier, liminal zone, in-between 26, 33, 60, 61, 62, 70, 77, 79, 86, 89, 93, 96, 103, 141, 151, 155, 164, 166, 197, 218, 242, 260, 266; political strategy vs. literary perspective 39, 173; republican model (French) 38; rise of ethnic attribution 158; ‘socialist empires’ 195; supranationalism, multinationalism, multiculturality 20, 39, 62, 108, 157, 158, 159, 167, 168, 171, 172, 201, 202, 205, 213, 221; traffic and communational infrastructures 79, 80, 153, 257; translatio imperii 33, 35; trespassers: ‘frontier men’ (Grenzmenschen, Roth) 208, 209, 214; unbounded freedom and multitude (Hardt/Negri) 33; Weltschmerz 163;

304 Western disciplinary, soft, indirect, affirmative vs. Eastern sovereign, hard, direct, assimilative pattern of rule 29, 63, 161, 162, 163 Indistinction: as indifferent sovereignty 13; as the consequence of analogies, parallels, comparisons, back-projections 28, 41, 89, 101, 102, 118, 137, 160; commonalityto-come 168; confusion/collapse of national, social, and economic questions 86, 103; established by beauty, art, nature, death and eternity 193, 206, 225; Gesamtkunstwerk: collapsing distinctions between arts, genres, and media 55, 97, 116, 187; heterotopias (Foucault) 197; individual residue (‘swamp’, ‘soul’, ‘the real’, Lacan) 8, 23, 80, 88, 89, 96, 123, 192, 207; Jewish 145, 148, 168, 192, 193, 197, 206, 210, 211; merging of ethics and aesthetics (Wittgenstein, Kraus) 97; of individuals, persons 7; of low social strata 90; of ‘marginal’ literary works 2, 58; of post-imperial nations 39, 40, 69, 234; of the ‘coming community’ (Agamben) 229; of the (late) imperial periphery 20, 75, 79, 92, 96, 144, 152, 158, 166; populist amalgams 5, 41, 42, 86, 87, 96, 97, 102, 103, 107, 148, 149; provincial ‘swamp’ 61, 82, 83, 88, 90, 107, 210; state, condition of i. 7, 43; the (South-) Slav tribal 73, 193, 196, 201, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 210, 211, 212; ‘zone of indeterminacy’ (Agamben, Povinelli) 32, 42, 96; zone of i. (Agamben) 5, 7, 15, 141, 193, 243, 275 Individuality See Dispossession; Indistinction; Modernity; Self-exemption; Solitude Islam/ification/Muslim(s) 34, 40, 118, 159, 166, 171, 174, 207 Jakšić, Đura 44 Jameson, Frederic 1, 236, 288 Janik, Allan 97, 98, 173, 187, 288 JanMohamed, Abdul R. 46, 288 Ješić, Nedeljko 43, 44, 51, 55, 56, 58, 127, 288 Jewish(ness): alliance with the weak or outsiders 12, 145, 146, 148, 149, 185;

INDEX and cosmopolitanism 145; as a vague background 146; Ashkenazi 234; assimilated 127; attached to Enlightenment 186, 244; Austrian 26; Berlin 244, 262; descent 145; dislocation within dislocation 210, 211; escape into nature and art 185; ethical pursuit of truth and honesty (Kraus) 186; Galician 163; German 243, 246; Habsburg 145; Hasidim (religious fanatism) 145; Hungarian 185; hyphenated identities (hybrid, half-Jewish) 167; in a constant state of flux 17, 273; indistinction as the ferment (Kraus) 145, 148, 168, 185, 186, 192, 193; internally external/ exterior 31, 127, 128, 145, 146, 148, 149, 152, 167, 168, 185, 192, 242, 243; isolation, solitude 148, 211, 213, 233, 242; liberalism and education 127, 146; “mechanism of over-compensation” (Broch) 146; nationalism 145; peripheral, provincial 151, 206, 210, 211; secular 185, 186, 260; separate identity 145, 186; stigmatized 185; Ukrainian 206, 234, 242; untranslatable in the European context 17; Viennese/urban 127, 186; vs. Gentiles 127, 145, 167; Zionism 127, 185, 242 Joseph II, Emperor 38, 105, 144, 145, 170, 183, 186, 195, 197 Joyce, James 185 Judson, Pieter M. 37, 38, 60, 79, 80, 86, 105, 121, 127, 145, 147, 153, 166, 183, 195, 198, 257, 288 Kamov, Janko Polić 289, 293; “Freedom” (Sloboda) 86; The Drained Swamp (Isušena kaljuža) 28, 29, 60, 61, 62, 63, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 95, 96, 216 Kant, Immanuel 2, 7, 15, 35, 137, 171, 173, 180, 181, 187, 188, 235, 251, 263, 264, 269, 270, 289 Karas, Vjekoslav 49, 118 Katušić, Bernarda 197, 289 Keyder, Çağlar 197, 198, 289 Khuen-Héderváry, Károly 258

INDEX Kierkegaard, Søren 100, 133 Klee, Paul 165 Kočić, Petar 40, 289 Kojève, Alexandre 229 Königgrätz, Battle of 24, 130, 144, 147, 153, 184, 185 Konstantinović, Radomir: Ahasuerus or the Treatise on the Beer Bottle (Ahasver ili traktat o pivskoj flaši) 216; Descartes’ Death (Dekartova smrt) 5, 31, 32, 199, 214, 215, 216, 220, 224, 225, 227, 231, 233; Filosofija palanke (Philosophy of the Province) 62, 63, 64, 66, 67, 68, 89, 72, 73, 78, 219, 227, 289; Give Us Today (Daj nam danas) 216, 227; The Clean Ones and the Dirty Ones (Čisti i prljavi) 216; The Mousetrap (Mišolovka) 216; The Pentagram (Pentagram) 215, 216, 217, 218, 219, 220, 225, 226, 228, 232, 289; “Titova misao” (Tito’s Thought) 221, 289 Kosor, Josip 106 Kossuth, Lajos 139 Kovačević, Nataša 172, 289 Kovačić, Ante 49, 119 Kożuchowski, Adam 147, 168, 199, 200, 204, 289 Kracauer, Siegfried 248 Kramer, Alan 45, 289 Kranjčević, Silvije Strahimir 49, 54, 106, 108, 118 Kraske, Bernd M. 200, 282, 289 Kraus, Karl: “Beim Wort genommen” 187, 188, 289; “Die Sprache” 187; Die letzten Tage der Menschheit (The Last Days of Humankind) 183, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 289; “Eine Krone für Zion” 184, 192, 243, 289; “In dieser großen Zeit?” 187; “Untergang der Welt durch schwarze Magie” 187, 289 Kravar, Zoran 98, 290 Kristeva, Julia 90, 153, 154, 290 Križanić, Juraj 49, 55, 106, 108, 109, 111, 115 Krleža, Miroslav 5, 7, 28, 29, 30, 32, 33, 42, 44, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 58, 59, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 173, 186, 235, 239, 257, 258, 259, 260, 261, 262, 263, 264,266, 268, 269, 270, 271, 272, 274, 275, 283, 290, 291, 295, 296;

305 Davni dani I (Bygone Days) 48, 49, 50, 263, 270, 272, 274; Davni dani II (Bygone Days) 48, 263; Djetinjstvo 1902–03 (A Childhood 1902–03) 290; Djetinjstvo u Agramu 1902–03 (A Childhood in Agram 1902–1903) 32, 48, 51, 258, 261, 262, 264, 265, 268, 282, 290, 291; “Epilog” 259, 289, 290; Glembajevi. Proza 46, 47, 51, 52, 290; “Hrvatska književna laž” (The Croatian Literary Lie) 48, 103, 104, 106, 107, 108, 110, 112; “Hrvatska rapsodija” (The Croatian Rhapsody) 48, 55, 99, 101, 103, 104, 107, 108, 111, 117; “Izlet u Rusiju” (Excursion to Russia) 108, 110, 112; “M. Crnjanski o ratu” (M. Crnjanski on War) 59, 290; “Nekoliko riječi o malograđanskom historizmu uopće” (A Few Words on Petty-Bourgeois Historicism In and Of Itself) 101, 113, 290; “O Kranjčevićevoj lirici” 49, 106, 118, 119, 290; «O patru dominikancu Jurju Križaniću» 47, 106, 115, 290; Pijana novembarska noć 1918 290; “Pismo iz Koprivnice” 46, 290; “Predgovor ‘Podravskim motivima’ Krste Hegedušića” 46; “Razgovor o istini” (A Conversation about the Truth) 269, 290; “Razgovor sa sjenom Frana Supila” 110, 111, 112, 290; “Stjepan Radić na odru” 110; “Stjepan Radić u Beogradu” 50, 109; “Teze za jednu diskusiju iz godine 1935” (Theses for a Discussion from the Year 1935) 49, 117, 119; “Zapisi iz godine 1942” (Notes from the Year 1942) 258, 259 Lacan, Jacques 14, 90, 94, 96, 295 LaCapra, Dominick 6, 10, 42, 291 Large, William 230 Lasić, Stanko 51, 55, 106, 291 Lazar, King/Emperor 50, 54, 75 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich 49, 108, 109, 114, 277 Levinas, Emmanuel 254, 255, 291 Levy, Daniel 11, 291 Life: animal 8; authentic 164; bare (‘living dead’, ‘living ghost’, Agamben) 1, 4, 7, 8, 9, 22, 28, 41, 42, 43, 50, 54, 78, 232, 254; bloßes Leben (Benjamin) 4, 7, 42, 254; conceived as art/novel 32; dense network of relationships between creatures and phenomena (Benjamin) 8,

306 125; design 86, 95, 153, 163; enjoying the right to an unquestioned authority (state of exception) 18, 254, 273; individual vs. communal 81; l. trajectory 56, 163, 209, 211, 263; lethal absence of l. 159; negating all properties 10; l. orientation 86, 272; philosophy of 8, 125; right to l. 263; surrendered to the whims of history 271; survival, living-on (Überleben, Fortleben) or subsistence 8, 45, 64, 75, 78, 103, 119, 131, 157, 166; untranslatable 2; vs. art 185, 225; vs. death 133, 226; vs. literature 90, 234; vs. manifestations 17; vs. mortification 78 Liska, Vivian 242, 243, 291 Loewenberg, Peter 185, 291 Louise of Mecklenburg-Sterlitz, Empress  245 Luhmann, Niklas 58, 69, 83, 88, 94, 96, 155, 257, 268, 270, 291 Mach, Ernst 186 Magris, Claudio 98, 144, 158, 160, 183, 184, 186, 200, 291 Mahler, Gustav 148, 192 Mallarmé, Stéphane 229 Mamdani, Mahmood 37, 116, 120, 291, 292 Mardin, Şerif 292 Maria Theresa, Empress 105, 144, 183 Marinković, Ranko 217, 227, 292 Marjanović, Petar 135, 138, 139, 140, 292 Martin, Terry 38, 108, 113, 285, 286, 292 Marx, Karl 24, 65, 147, 152, 284 Marxism/Marxist 33, 108, 114, 120, 269, 274 Matoš, Antun Gustav 49, 99, 118 Matuschek, Stephen 90, 292 May, Todd 90, 292 Mehmed Pasha Sokolović 161, 171 Memory: adopted 120; archive (divided, Benjamin) 7, 9, 125, 248, 250, 264, 273; as a historical force 240, 257; as the ultimate agent vs. outcome of retroactive mystification 256; befallen, possessed by m. 126; broken heritage lines 13; childhood recollection 238; collective 40, 64, 65, 66, 67, 89, 162, 240; commemoration 237, 245; condensed images of m. 78;

INDEX corporeal (somatic, sensual) vs. rational (mediated, drilled) 8, 249, 250, 252, 264, 265, 272; counter-project 165, 236; decomposition 81; dispersive 8; disrupted 225; embedded 248; emptied 89; endangered, traumatized 16; engineers of m. 240; enigmatic images vs. primordial images (puncta, Barthes) 248, 249, 250, 251, 252, 253, 264, 265, 266, 273, 274; familial vs. affiliative (Hirsch) 13, 14, 239; flashing up, flickering, interrupting 150, 250, 251, 254; historical development of 241; images of images of images (Krleža) 265; immemorial origin or zone, prehistory 8, 9, 64, 125; individual 7, 10, 81; interlocking 7; interminable chain of transmissions 8; involuntary 7, 8, 9, 66, 125; m. traces 8, 125, 250, 266; me-memory (michGedächtnis, Assmann) 239; memento mori 129, 131; multidirectional 8, 11, 12; multiply mediated 214; oblivion, forgetting, amnesia 12, 241, 256; of the province/palanka 67; of urban spaces 258; picture puzzles (Bilderrätsel, Benjamin) 250, 253, 273; politics of m. 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 235, 237, 239, 241, 243, 245, 247, 249, 251, 253, 255, 257, 259, 261, 263, 265, 267, 269, 271, 273, 275; postmemory (Hirsch) 13, 14, 241; remembrance of the lost past 240, 270; screen (Deckerinnerung, Freud) 11, 12, 13, 238, 239, 256; selective 127; studies 11; technologically shaped 28; therapeutic reminiscence 124; voluntary 7, 66, 125; vs. history 9 Menasse, Robert 24, 98, 100, 106, 165, 292 Messianism: 23, 165, 166, 167, 237; Absent God 18, 55, 126, 176, 273; empowerment through disempowerment 269; eternal Sabbath 229; impartial divine Judge 31, 193; mediator of the truth 166, 211; Messiah 23, 126, 153, 166, 175; meticulously preserving evidence for the final account yet to come (Benjamin, Andrić) 165; mission 100, 179; negative theology 55, 126, 264, 273; postponed

INDEX reunion of divided humankind 174; project: political vs. literary 182; strong (directed toward ultimate salvation) 30, 112; Subject That Knows 169, 174, 182; ‘the place of the true judgment’ (Andrić) 175; the truth’s or character’s or artwork’s silent, unfathomable, indifferent self-sufficiency (Andrić) 180; unity yet-to-be 180; unshakable faith in the divine redemption 175; weak (endlessly postponing, longing for the final truth) 6, 19, 22, 32, 126, 165, 169, 175, 275 Meštrović, Ivan 107 Michelangelo 49, 109 Mignolo, Walter 9, 35, 292 Milica Bakić-Hayden 174 Milošević, Nikola 163, 292 Milutinović, Zoran 161, 217, 277, 292 Mimicry See Redoubling Miming See Redoubling Miočinović, Mirjana 122, 131, 133, 135, 137, 139, 292 Mirroring See Redoubling Mocking See Redoubling Modernity/modernization: antimodernist spirit, monarchism, nostalgia, defense of the sunken humanism: mainstream vs. provincial 33, 144, 186, 200, 238; cultivation, disciplining of the wild past 83; destructive process of m. 65, 151, 152; disaggregation of m. 80; dis/junctive spaces of the public and private 164, 219; ‘empirico-transcendental doublet’ (Foucault) 82, 87, 91; epitomized by an aberrant, itinerant, interminable individual(ization) 73, 159; ethnological and sociological interrogation of m. 218; exempt from m. 31; mobility vs. immobility: flaneur vs. immobile traveller 79, 93, 251; observation of latency (Latenzbeobachten, Luhmann) 10, 17, 69, 71, 85, 86, 141, 249; pre-modern age 31, 250; raising the vipers in its own bosom 3, 35, 60, 62, 70, 79, 80, 159, 163, 164, 165, 197, 198, 277; resistance to m.: hate of democracy 152; vibration of possibilities

307 (contingency) 86, 149, 231; vs. medieval or feudal relationships 74; WestEuropean vs. East-Central European 158 Molière, Jean Baptiste Poquelin 133 Montaigne, Michel de 221, 226, 227 Motyl, Alexander J. 33, 38, 60, 159, 194, 198, 292 Musil, Robert 23, 24, 86, 88, 89, 94, 96, 123, 128, 129, 137, 138, 196, 197, 209, 231, 232, 234, 292 Muslim(s) See Islam/ification Mylonas, Christos 41, 45, 292 Naipaul, Vidiadhar Surajprasad 164 Nako, Jovan 135, 139 Napoleon 148, 174 Nation: Austrian 145; autonomy of n.  8, 14, 40, 63, 125, 214, 233, 234, 258, 274; bereft of distinction 6; (bourgeois or petty-bourgeois) elite’s vs. déclassé (proletarian) people’s 48, 90, 98, 101, 103, 105, 113, 119, 260; building 31; changing paradigm of n. 37; civic 61; co-national vs. non-national 39; consciousness of n. 121; conspiracy against n. 115, 214; Croatian 50, 98, 99, 103, 108, 111, 113, 120, 258, 274; cultural (Kulturnation, Herder) 111; degenerate collective portrayal of n. 100; disappearing into the limitless (Hofmannstahl) 142; dispossessed n. 113; dominant vs. dominated 92, 146; ethnic (ethno-nationalism) 112, 116, 145, 170; German 39, 143, 149, 242; Hungarian (Magyar) 63, 158; imperial conception of n. 37; liberal vs. narrow-minded 97, 171; liberation of n. 69, 108; linguistic 37; Marxist doctrine of n. 113; medieval vs. modern 43; nationhood 37, 121; open vs. self-content 39; patriotism/ nationalism 63; petty 213; ‘primordial power’ (Hofmannstahl) of n. 143; proletarian, radical vs. pettybourgeois, calculating consciousness of n. 98, 113; provincial nationalities (Volksstämme) 195; resentment 52; self-determined and independent 29,

308 53, 101, 111, 112, 113, 114, 119, 120, 121, 146, 263; Serbian 107, 108; spirit/uality (Volksgeist, Herder), ‘the people’s soul’ (Hofmannsthal) 39; -state (newly formed vs. well-established) 31, 33, 34, 38, 40, 60, 158, 212, 227; suppressed 101; tragedy of n. 102; unification, homogenization 215; Volkszugehörigkeit vs. Staatsangehörigkeit 242; vs. class 113; West-European vs. EastCentral European 29, 35; wounded consciousness of n. 115 Nazism/National Socialism 22, 32, 45, 115, 119, 149, 211, 217, 231, 245, 246, 258, 259, 261, 269, 274 Negri, Antonio 33, 286 Nemec, Krešimir 157, 292 Nestroy, Johann 187 Niethammer, Lutz 64, 292 Nietzsche, Friedrich 3, 48, 55, 80, 81, 89, 90, 92, 93, 94, 96, 97, 100, 102, 104, 173, 186, 270, 279, 283, 292, 293, 295 Nikolajević, Božidar 52, 53 Nikolajević, Svetomir 52 Njegoš, Petar II Petrović 44 Nodia, Nino 24, 25, 146, 147, 148, 152, 153, 293 Novalis, Friedrich von Hardenberg 9, 235, 236, 253, 262, 263, 293 Nürnberger, Helmuth 200, 293 Obilić, Miloš 50, 54, 75, 139 Obrenović, Mihajlo III 135 Oriental/ism 147, 156, 163; ‘nesting’ (BakićHayden) 116, 174 Orthodox(y) 34, 40, 57, 75, 118, 166, 171, 196 Other(ness): as enemy 70; buffoon 131, 154, 173; close fellow-being or neighbour (other-as-object) vs. distant, inarticulate (other as model) 2, 3, 14, 15; depersonalized o. as a projection surface 152, 196; derogation of Oriental subordinates 147, 156, 174, 175; dislocated, transborder co-nationals vs. non-national co-fellows (co-citizens, compatriots) 39, 242, 258; dissident 74, 96; external vs. internal 274; imagined 138, 197; ‘indigenous foreign’ 39, 75, 119, 153, 174; internally external 4, 31, 36, 59, 61, 64, 66, 68, 73, 74, 81, 85, 88, 100, 121, 150, 152,

INDEX 159, 166, 180, 202, 226, 243, 274; “inverse ventriloquism” (Anderson) 3, 246; native vs. foreigner/settler 61, 72, 75, 210; necessary enrichment to the self 153; noble savage or wild or exotic 26, 36, 139, 152, 153, 196, 197; Other (Autre) vs. other (autrui) 230; permanent condition of self’s possibility 154; ‘proximate remote’ 152; stigmatized, branded 69, 147; taking the point of view of o. 71; witch-angel 150 Ottoman Empire 28, 34, 41, 43, 44, 60, 62, 75, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 166, 177, 198, 289, 292 Pannwitz, Rudolf 147 Pascal, Blaise 215, 222, 224, 226, 227, 228 Paternal protection: ‘animalized’ or derogated (Konstantinović) 224, 225; bereft of p. p. (abandoned by parents or father, Roth, Konstantinović) 217, 221, 224, 228; by ‘benefactors’ (Roth, Crnjanski, Kamov) 52, 82, 209; by beauty and nature’s harmony (Andrić) 31, 182; by elusive messianic authority 180, 223, 226, 234; by generous internationalism or cosmopolitanism (Andrić) 170; by the narrator as an indifferent sage (Andrić) 171; by the province (palanka) 72, 77; by the representatives of (post-)imperial central constituencies 31; by the “representatives of society” (bosses, husbands, clerks, brothel owners, professors, and priests) 86; by the Supreme Will of the Conductor 191; by the “Third in the dialogue” (Bakhtin) 176; charity or compassion drive (Roth, Crnjanski) 51, 52, 209; demise of (the death of god, Nietzsche) 94; despotism 75, 147; disciplining, taming the ‘wildes’ 29, 60, 63; divine 218, 219, 231; ‘enlightened absolutism’ 195; familial (husband, father, father-in-law, ancestor, Primordial Father) 67, 74, 75, 199, 204; family model of the state 38, 261; Father God 224; from God to the nation-state 212; himself his

INDEX own father (Konstantinović) 224; impartial divine Judge (Andrić) or the supreme Court (Kraus) 193; imperial relationship or mission of centers towards peripheries 266; literary (author vs. narrator vs. figures/characters) 214; logic of p. p. 195; messianic (Absent God) 176; obedient/submissive position of the daughter (Stanković) 74; over the son (Roth, Konstantinović) 202, 204, 234; patrons and patronized 118, 134; “process of civilization” (Elias) 195, 197; quasi-egalitarian attitude 171; rebellion against (Kamov) 63, 86; religious (God, Saviour) 100; rigid or strict or ‘bestial’ (Roth, Konstantinović) 224, 227, 228; state-political (Emperor, Leader, Sovereign) 31, 169, 199; Subject that Knows 169, 182; surrogate fathers (Roth) 202; the providence’s selfappointed pastors 169; undermining and disabling of p. p. 197; unshakable faith in p. p. (Andrić, Bakhtin) 178; Western mission 174 Paul, Apostle (St Paul) 229, 230 Paulus “Ohm” Krüger 244 Pavićević, Borka 137, 138, 293 Pazi, Margarita 200, 293 Periphery/province See Imperial, Indistinction, Jewishness, Paternal protection, Post-imperial Pessoa, Fernando 106 Petković, Novica 72, 73, 76, 293 Pirandello, Luigi 106 Poles (Poland, Polish) 20, 115, 208, 212, 242 Politics: as business (rational choices and short-term interests) vs. vision (long-term projection and investment) 112, 168; compensatory, remedial, redemptive, therapeutic 25, 183, 193, 241; disciplinary (capillary surveillance) 29, 161, 162, 163, 164; doubly frustrated 257; fatherland p. 244; imperial 257, 258; of anarchism, bifurcated: shortterm activism vs. long-term intellectual operation (self-sublimation) 90, 95; of detachment, distancing, locating the other 203, 214; of empire 214, 257,

309 258; of ‘ethnicization’ 244; of literary projects: long-term salvation 183; of mass movements 168; of remembrance 5, 235, 237, 239, 241, 243, 245, 247, 249, 251, 253, 255, 257, 259, 261, 263, 265, 267, 269, 271, 273, 275; of segregation and partition 112; of trauma 193, 281; populist 86, 119, 149; realpolitik of the day 112; revolutionary 263; sacrificial 41; sovereign 53, 54, 55, 161, 162, 163, 164; vs. ethics 168; vs. police (Rancière) 19 Post-imperial: central vs. peripheral or marginal constituencies 31, 168, 195, 198; contingency 231; democracies 5, 39, 112, 168, 172, 182; divided belonging 167; East Central Europe vs. Western Europe 40, 114; Europe 5, 20, 28, 157, 169, 275; feeling of dispossession 125; imperialism 171; mixture of ethnic and civic nationalism 61, 171; multinational states based on the imperial principle 20, 168; nationally inflamed constellation 30, 122, 171; nostalgia 33; novel 23, 28, 29, 31, 45, 50, 56, 57, 58, 60, 61, 62, 67, 68, 69, 70, 89, 78, 79, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 95, 97, 129, 136, 137, 157, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 180, 181, 185, 197, 199, 200, 201, 202, 204, 208, 209, 211, 213, 214, 215, 216, 217, 220, 221, 223, 224, 226, 234, 235, 262, 275; observation of latency 69, 71; replica of the imperial relationship toward the subordinates 127, 171; reunion of divided humankind 174; revengeful process of “reverse colonization” 126; self-humiliation or self-torment as the redoubling of the imperial humiliation or torment 116; state or condition 6, 30, 97; sublimation of hatred into love (Nietzsche) 173; successor states vs. new nation-states 20, 28, 30, 31, 39, 40, 97, 98, 167; zones of indistinction 2, 3, 7, 28, 137 Pound, Ezra 215, 226, 227 Povinelli, Elisabeth 21, 25, 36, 40, 197, 232, 293 Princip, Gavrilo 42, 44, 49, 54, 161 Prohaska, Dragutin 122, 293 Promitzer, Christian 61

310 Protestant/ism 185, 260 Proust, Marcel 7, 265, 266, 283, 293 Public/private See Modernity/ Modernization, Disjunctive conjunction Radić, Stjepan 49, 50, 106, 109, 110, 111, 113, 290 Radičević, Branko 131, 134, 137 Rajačić, Josif 135, 136, 139 Rakić, Milan 43, 47 Ramet, Sabrina P. 159, 293 Rancière, Jacques 19, 20, 69, 293 Rang, Florens Christian 242 Re-description See Redoubling Redoubling/reduplication: Absent God’s interminable (Derrida) 18, 55, 126, 273; allegory (Benjamin) 237, 238; applying to one’s self attitude of the other 241; après coup 219, 281; copying to our servants the Emperor’s paternal attitude to ourselves (Roth, Hoffmanstahl) 26; corporeal sensuous 250; déjà vu 10, 85, 206, 236; empirico-transcendental doublet (Foucault) 82, 87, 88, 91; entrapment within 74; Great Mediator of r. 206; historical r.: Caligula by Eichmann, colonial crimes by the Holocaust 217, 218, 262; imitation, semblance, subversive mimicry (Bhabha, Kraus) 189, 192; impersonating (Nietzsche, Weininger, Kraus) 187, 208; looking at one’s self through the degrading optics of the others: ‘double consciousness’ (Du Bois) 167; mimetic ability or faculty (mimetisches Vermögen, Benjamin) 126, 248, 252; nesting resonances: ‘sense of the possible’ (Möglichkeitssinn, Musil) 86, 231, 232; of a character by the author (Kamov, Roth) 83, 207; of an author through the doubles, representatives, doppelgängers, personas, alter egos: ‘divided personality’ (Hofmannstahl, Andrić, Krleža) 58, 150, 178, 180, 212; of detachment (Roth) 203; of fathers by sons (Stanković, Roth, Konstantinović) 74, 202, 205; of grandfathers by grandsons (Roth) 204;

INDEX of one diegetic (narrative, fictional) level by another (embedding): ‘hall of echoes’ (Kamov, Konstantinović) 85, 226; of trauma 184; public echoes of the private secrets (Andrić) 197; “return of the repressed 75; through intertextual references (Kraus) 187; through quotation marks 190; through surrogate mothers and fathers (Stanković, Kraus) 207; translating the mode of revelation into the mode of communication (Benjamin) 273; uncanny (Unheimliche, Freud) 3, 7, 9, 18, 21, 75, 85, 157, 236, 237, 239, 240, 261, 273 Reinhardt, Max 187 Renan, Ernst 152, 158 Revolution: all-encompassing, radical: final liberation 29, 32; anarchy, atavism, cruelty 80, 87, 120, 161, 162; artistic vs. political 103; as a challenge or demand of the present or the moment or the age 48, 232; as a male affair or ‘manly struggle’ (Krleža) 48, 102; as flame, fire, arson, destruction 13, 90, 104, 105, 107, 120, 182, 183, 221, 230, 236, 239, 250, 256; Bolshevik 108, 115; compensatory revolt 120; conservative revolution (Hofmannstahl) 22, 143, 165; February 101; French 2, 4, 5, 38, 65, 137, 195, 263; national 103, 108, 129, 140; October 47, 101, 103, 104, 107, 119; of the humiliated and injured 47, 107, 139, 270; phantasy 10; redefinition of all values (Nietzsche) 104; Serbian national (1848) 129; social 105; socialist 114; victims of r. 120 Rilke, Reiner Maria 82, 91, 96, 216, 226, 227, 283 Ristori, Giovanni Alberto 139 Roman Empire 14, 33, 34, 35, 105, 261, 284, 296 Rosa, Hartmut 152, 155, 294 Rosenfeld, Sidney 200, 284, 294 Rostand, Edmond 122 Roth, Joseph 129, 163, 202, 208, 234, 282, 284, 289, 293; “Die Büste des Kaisers” (Emperor’s Bust) 209; Radetzkymarsch

INDEX (The Radetzky March) 5, 7, 8, 31, 32, 45, 61, 194, 199, 200, 201, 204, 206, 209, 211, 213, 214, 233, 294 Rothberg, Michael 11, 12, 14, 15, 36, 218, 230, 294 Rougemont, Denis de 133 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 65 Russian Empire 41 Russia/n 26, 27, 41, 56, 61, 89, 107, 108, 114, 115, 116, 119, 122, 133, 135, 136, 139, 164, 168, 170, 205, 208, 211, 212, 279, 282, 283, 287, 288, 289, 292, 294, 295, 296; Empire 41, 208; Soviet Union 108, 114, 115, 116, 168, 170 Ruthenian(s) 212, See Ukrainian(s) Sacrifice/victimhood: advocacy of s. 7, 87; artistic sublimation of v. 172; artists, poets, authors as victims 240; attachment to s. 139; beneficial (by the social elite’s representatives) 54; Croatian 106, 109, 110, 111; figures/ characters as v. 1, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 11, 12, 18, 20, 21, 22, 23, 30, 43, 49, 53, 63, 69, 78, 86, 87, 105, 116, 118, 125, 126, 129, 130, 132, 136, 138, 140, 141, 164, 165, 172, 173, 183, 188, 189, 214, 228, 232, 233, 240, 256, 271; for ‘general interest’ 85, 86; for homeland 109; for the family 74, 77; for the oppressed 87; for the subordinates 45; heroic 39, 42, 44, 45, 141; induced by carnival 129, 140; Jewish 192; logics of s. 45; martyrdom: bellicose, heavenly 45, 46, 49, 50, 51, 53, 54, 75, 106, 109, 110, 111, 118, 119, 141; mission 172; mythical appropriation of s./manipulative mythopoeia 21, 50, 107, 156, 169, 174; narratives: political vs. literary 7, 21; of individuals by society 3, 54; of men 87; of one’s own (private) body 76; of one’s own distinct identity 7; of women 86, 87; of workers 87; patterns/forms 5, 41, 138; predecessors as victims 44, 106, 111, 162, 173; revolutionary 48; salvation 45; self-sacrifice, selfdissolution, ecstasy, delirium 27, 45, 109, 126, 138; self-torment as a source of enjoyment or pleasure 59, 116; source

311 of empowerment or redemption 46; taking up the former colonizer’s mission: remedial-self-aggrandizement 174, 234; through the development of history: continuity of the predecessors and contemporaries 252; versions of national history 127; vs. perpetrators  105, 118 Saint Augustine 131, 261 Santner, Eric L. 4, 294 Saussy, Haun 11, 294 Schad, John 237, 284, 294 Schäfer, Rudolph H. 123, 131, 132, 134, 138, 149, 150, 151, 163, 191, 294 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph 235, 236 Schenk, Frithjof Benjamin 79, 80, 294 Schlegel, Dorothea von 148 Schlegel, Friedrich 145, 148, 235, 263 Schnitzler, Artur 58, 122, 234 Schoen, Ernst 242 Schönerer, Georg von 5 Schopenhauer, Arthur 49, 187, 269 Schorske, Carl E. 5, 86, 103, 149, 168, 194, 294 Schwab, Gabrielle 11, 12, 14, 15, 294 Second World War 117, 162, 217, 221, 266, 274 Sedan, Battle of 245 Sekulić, Isidora 58, 163, 294 Self-exemption: 2, 3, 5, 6, 14, 15, 16, 19, 29, 30, 41, 62, 66, 74, 77, 91, 93, 95, 126, 130, 168, 181, 261, 262, 263, 264, 267, 269, 270, 271, 272; artistic play (Krleža) 266; as ‘mimetic ability’ (mimetisches Vermögen, Benjamin) 126, 248, 252; autopoiesis (self-creation, Luhmann) 268; becoming a game instead of play (Krleža) 268; change/turnaround of perspectives (Nietzsche) 90, 91, 92, 96, 97, 100, 104, 173, 186; child’s from the social mess (Benjamin, Krleža) 248; child’s vs. writer’s (Krleža) 270; coupled with self-dispossession (Stanković) 94; de-identification: politically enforced vs. individually intended 232; désœuvrement/unworking (Blanchot) 96, 229, 230, 232, 262; dislocation: desired vs. undesired 213; ‘double negation’ (Hegel) 63, 90;

312 epitomized by untranslatability (Apter) 16; ethical postponement of action or judgement 90, 243; failed: return of the repressed 75, 93, 218; frenetic activity of selfreconfiguration (Nietzsche) 270, 274; from conceptual similarities into sensuous resemblances: unwinding or back-folding (Benjamin) 251, 252, 266; from everything: the ‘living dead’ (Kamov, Stanković) 78, 94; from hereditary ties (Kamov) 82; from historical progress (Hofmannstahl, Crnjanski, Benjamin) 144, 162, 182, 252; from humanity (Benjamin) 37; from humiliating, denigrating circumstances (Kraus, Stanković, Benjamin) 149; from identity ascriptions, patterns, qualities, social attributions into absence: selfvoiding, self-emptying, self-deactivating, self-disengagement 2, 123, 164, 167, 186, 257; from opinions into reasoning (Kraus) 187; from society’s oppression (Kamov) 86; from stigma into a ferment (Kraus) 184, 192, 243; from the fatherly care (Roth, Kamov, Konstantinović) 228; from the imposed communal rules 263; from the ‘noise of earthly human affairs’ into the silence/death (Andrić) 179; from the old into the new 261; from the present (ugly, unbearable) reality into a timeless and placeless community (Benjamin, Hofmannstahl, Crnjanski, Konstantinović) 123, 124, 140, 236; from the province (palanka) 72, 73, 74, 77, 79, 80; from the ready-made patterns of the world 267; from the responsibility for the world 191; from the short-term political activism into a long-term life project (Andrić) 183; from the world of adults (Benjamin, Krleža) 248, 249, 270; imperative or pressure to s. (Stanković) 271; impersonating or adapting to others (Kraus, Nietzsche) 187, 208; individualization, an interminable process of s. 88; into a bundle of personas, alter egos, Doppelgängers 44, 55, 59, 100, 106, 135, 147, 150, 185, 186; into the

INDEX imitation, semblance (Kraus) 189; into the impartial ahistorical position ‘above the fray’ (Andrić) 174, 270; into the indistict nature 140; into the ‘oceanic feeling’ 27, 123, 124, 126, 138, 140, 155; into the primordial condition of a mere receptacle (Krleža) 264, 266; into the role of the writer (Kamov, Krleža) 32, 208, 270; of ethics from the sphere of politics 104; of impression from observation (Krleža) 269; of silence and beauty from the petty human belongings (Andrić) 181; of the author from the narrator (Kamov) 256; of the creative freedom from the confinements of the world’s spectacle (Kraus) 187, 189; of the medieval folk festivities from the course of time 143; of the narrating I from the experiencing I (Kamov, Benjamin, Krleža) 87; of the narrator from characters (Roth, Kamov) 82; reflective judgement (Kant) 2, 269; refusal of identification 68; self-contradiction, self-disintegration, self-splitting, selfmultiplication (Hofmannstahl, Crnjanski, Kraus, Krleža) 44, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 100, 101, 102, 106, 108, 115, 116; side leaps, leaps out, stepping-outside-oneself (Benjamin, Hofmannstahl, Crnjanski) 8, 123; ‘sumatraism’ (Crnjanski) 27, 137, 141; technologies of self-authoring and otherauthoring (meandering identity politics, Kamov, Nietzsche, Andrić) 31, 95, 96, 158, 180; through solitude or isolation (Roth, Stanković, Konstantinović) 72, 76, 128, 148, 203, 210, 220, 225; through the operation of dis/location (Roth) 194; vs. public state of exception (Benjamin, Stanković, Kamov) 264, 267; vs. self-anchoring or self-assertion 142; witnessing by adoption (Hartman) 246 Selimović, Meša 216 Serbia, Serbs 20, 24, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 34, 42, 43, 44, 45, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 62, 75, 98, 99, 107, 108, 109, 110, 112, 119, 135, 136, 137, 146, 159, 161, 163, 164, 172, 177, 204, 205, 215, 216, 220, 224, 227, 234, 258, 259, 286, 293,

INDEX 296; Bosnian 40, 166, 170, 172, 173, 174; Habsburg (“from abroad”, Prečani) 28, 41, 45, 55, 56, 57, 58, 135, 136, 139, 140; Kingdom of Serbia 52, 61, 70, 76, 127; Ottoman 28, 41, 44, 45, 56, 57, 127, 172, 173; Yugoslav 168, 170, 171, 174 Serbian Uprisings 44, 172 Serbo-Croatian Coalition 104, 224 Seyhan, Azade 11, 294 Shakespeare, William 188, 189, 191, 218 Silverman, Kaja 3, 240, 294 Sloterdijk, Peter 97, 294, 295 Slovenia/n(s) 54, 42, 43, 62, 98, 108, 109, 110, 168, 202, 203, 204, 205, 208, 212, 259 Solferino, Battle of 129, 144, 202 Soviet Union See Russia/n(s) Staël, Anne Germaine de 148, 295 Stalin, Joseph Vissarionovich 38, 108, 114, 115, 295 Stanisavljević, Vukašin 67, 295 Stanković, Borisav 75, 78, 281, 286; Impure Blood (Nečista krv) 28, 29, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 67, 68, 72, 77, 82, 90 Stanković, Kornelije 27, 135, 139 Starčević, Ante 111 Starobinski, Jean 131 Stavrakakis, Iannis 90, 295 Stewart, Susan 238 Stirner, Max 112, 274, 295 Stourzh, Gerald 158, 295 Stråth, Bo 159, 292, 295, 296 Stratimirović, Đorđe 133, 135, 139 Strauss, Leo 200 Strauss, Richard 134, 149, 151, 154, 295 Sugar, Peter F. 158, 295 Supilo, Frano 49, 106, 110, 111, 112 Sznaider, Nathan 11, 291 Thum, Gregor 61, 244, 295 Tito, Josip Broz 195, 221, 224, 228 Todorova, Marija 34, 46, 89, 295 Tönnies, Ferdinand 65, 152 Toulmin, Stephen 97, 98, 173, 187, 288 Translation: as miming 17; as parting/ sharing with 250; fleetingness (Flüchtigkeit, Benjamin) 17, 18, 273; in the service of life 164; of untranslatable (primordial language of truth, childhood,

313 Jewishness) 11, 16, 17, 18, 273; t. zone (Apter) 18, 278; main principle of literature’s worlding (Apter) 7, 16, 20; untranslatability (Benjamin) 11, 17, 18, 273 Trauma: amnesia 12, 256; apocalypse or catastrophe 10, 14, 31, 37, 70, 77, 90, 95, 105, 118, 123, 125, 130, 190, 191, 198, 199, 209, 212, 213, 226, 228, 230, 236, 242, 243, 244, 253, 258, 274; as a storm or ‘wind’ or disaster 180, 221, 223, 226, 227; as a violent severance from the past 236; as the origin of cruel optimism (Berlant) 46; Austrian 140; constellation 2, 7, 16, 19, 21, 28, 152, 183, 241; Croatian 101; cumulative 12; defense mechanism, reaction, spasm  12, 125, 177; economic 130, 198; endless suffering 100; family 75; First World War’s and aftermath 27, 51; generational 183; German Romanticist  185; group or collective 6, 239; haunting spectrality of t. 219; historical 236; individual or personal 173; inflicted by the Nazis 22, 115, 119, 149, 211, 245, 269; internal solidarization through t. 66; isolation and self-enclosure 203, 204; Jewish 211; military 207; of being “stranded in the present” (Fritzsche) 122; of childhood 239; of collapsed empires 231; of execution sites 191; of the perpetrator 161, 238; of unhomeliness 4; political 39; posttraumatic situation: post-apocalypse 10, 15, 221, 230; remedial, therapeutic, redemptive project 183, 203; resulting in the scattered remnants 221, 223; Second World War’s 5; Serbian 43; series of t.  206; studies 11; suffering as the source of pride 41, 43, 44, 45, 46, 271; t. narrative or the story of suffering 116, 145; territorial 241; through the exposition to supervision 267 Trumpener, Katie 144, 295 Turk(s)/Ottoman(s) 28, 34, 43, 44, 47, 57, 61, 69, 70, 71, 74, 76, 89, 100, 106, 115, 117, 118, 126, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 166, 172, 174, 177

314 Ukrainian(s) 45, 203, 206, 207, 208, 209, 211, 234 Ungar, Steven 230, 295 Unheimliche (Freud): 3, 7, 18, 21, 75, 85, 157, 239, 240, 261, 285; as the common denominator of world literature (Apter) 5, 10, 16, 19, 167; childhood’s 271; encounter with a ghostly Doppelgänger 237; expressionless (Benjamin) 10, 126, 236; resonance/reverberation of the U. 236, 273; source of itinerancy 240; ‘spectral existence’ (Derrida) 237; unhomeliness vs. homeliness 16; unhomely or uncanny feeling or experience 9, 236 Valadez, Jorge M. 112, 295 Verdery, Katherine 116, 295 Verne, Jules 260 Vick, Brian 195, 296 Vienna 7, 8, 56, 57, 59, 97, 103, 127, 135, 136, 145, 148, 150, 151, 159, 167, 168, 184, 198, 278, 279, 285, 286, 289, 292, 294 Violence: borderland v. 244; dangling 45; decapitation 161; dismembering 76; execution 46; flogging 45; impalement 43, 45, 161; mode of liberation 49; mutilation 161; of dispossession narratives 116, 119; of the radical dis-alienation or ‘selfpurification’ 72, 119; outpourings of collective anger 178; ‘pure violence’ (Benjamin) 6, 42; quartering 45; revolutionary 263; sacrificial: selfdirected (expiating or repenting) vs. other-directed (bellicose or warlike) 54, 75; spectacles of sovereign power or rule 4, 161; stabbing 45; state v. 5, 42; torture 54, 56, 161; walloping 45 Vojnović, Ivo 107 Vojvodina 28, 41, 42, 45, 55, 57, 126, 129, 196 Vranje 61, 67, 68, 69, 70, 89, 73, 74, 75, 76, 79, 296 Vučković, Radovan 139, 141, 296 Vujačić, Veljko 38, 296 Wagner, Richard 55, 80, 97, 187, 292 Wagram, Batle of 148

INDEX Weber, Samuel 250, 251, 296 Weininger, Otto 58, 186, 187, 296 Weitz, Eric D. 62, 63, 89, 216, 279, 282, 288, 294, 295, 296 West/ern Europe/an 4, 24, 25, 29, 31, 35, 37, 53, 54, 59, 69, 111, 112, 114, 144, 147, 148, 158, 161, 186, 210, 260, 266 White, Hayden 66, 284, 296 Wierzbicki, Jan 262, 296 Wilhelm II, Emperor 61, 190, 244, 245 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim 26, 139 Wingfield, Nancy M. 62, 70, 158, 279, 286, 291, 293, 296 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 23, 55, 97, 166, 173, 186, 189, 231, 248, 286, 296 Wolf, Greg 34, 35, 296 Wolff, Larry 61, 89, 296 World: 2, 3, 4, 7, 9, 10, 11, 13, 14, 16, 18, 19, 20, 23, 25, 28, 32, 47, 49, 50, 52, 56, 58, 61, 66, 67, 68, 69, 73, 80, 81, 85, 86, 92, 95, 100, 116, 117, 118, 120, 124, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 134, 136, 137, 141, 142, 147, 148, 149, 151, 154, 155, 163, 164, 165, 166, 169, 170, 174, 175, 177, 180, 182, 185, 186, 187, 189, 190, 191, 192, 206, 210, 211, 212, 213, 214, 218, 219, 220, 221, 225, 226, 228, 231, 232, 233, 237, 240, 241, 244, 245, 248, 249, 252, 260, 262, 270, 272, 279; alternative 150; as a desired state 20; as a practice of highlighting the denial inherent in it 20; as potentiality vs. eternity 226; bourgeois 20, 90, 98, 129, 130, 143, 144, 186, 190, 191, 192, 247, 248, 251, 260; compartmentalized, fractured, dispossessed of the divine protection 23, 182, 212, 218, 241; determinate vs. indeterminate 19; devastated/in ruins 237; dissolving vs. safeguarded 233; divine design of the w. 170; dump vs. perfection 231; familiar 78; hate against 67; human 229; in ‘atomic disaggregation’ or shaking 80, 120; inimical 240; of adults vs. that of the child 249, 270; of possibilities 219; one vs. many 16; ongoing comedy of the w. 130; outside (inarticulate) vs. inside (ordered) 77; peasants’ w. 76; persistent rejection of the w. 67; plural and multifocal 92; posttraumatic/post-Holocaust 219;

INDEX represented vs. non-represented 220, 221, 225; resistance to its hardening 64; restricted vs. wide 73, 155, 248; space of dissent or of consensus 19; underworld 100, 131; utopian 165; w. history against contingent set of circumstances 164; w.’s regional constellations or nodes 16; worlding (self-deactivating) vs. globalization (selfaggrandizing) 3, 209 World literature 7, 11, 18, 19, 278; messianic or self-exempting 19; systemic or self-asserting 19 World War I See First World War, Great War World War II See Second World War Young Bosnia 166, 170 Young Turks 198

315 Yugoslavia 30, 31, 38, 43, 98, 158, 159, 168, 170, 195, 199, 214, 221, 227, 233, 258, 278; Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes  42, 43, 54, 62, 98, 108, 109, 110, 168, 259; Kingdom of Y. 98, 110, 224, 227, 259; Socialist Federative Republic of Y. 98, 120, 158, 159, 168, 170, 195, 199, 221, 224, 227 Zagreb (Agram) 5, 8, 29, 32, 50, 51, 61, 79, 80, 92, 93, 99, 159, 166, 235, 239, 257, 259, 260, 262, 264, 269, 275, 277, 281, 282, 283, 289, 290, 291, 292, 293, 295, 296 Zlatanović, Sanja 67, 296 Žmegač, Viktor 55, 100, 296 Zone of indeterminacy See Indistinction Zrinski, Petar 54, 161, 258 Zweig, Stefan 149, 196, 211, 296